The disrobing of Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) leader Bhikku Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara under standard prison regulations—and the JVP/NPP government’s rapid political capitulation to the Sinhala supremacist outcry that followed—has exposed the reactionary character of the Dissanayake regime with unusual clarity. What is at stake is not the dignity of the Buddhist clergy, but the consolidation of Sinhala-Buddhist authority over the state—and, through the state, over the Tamil and Muslim minorities.
Bhikkhu Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara (right) invited Burmese ultra-right-wing monk Ashin Wirathu (left), dubbed the “Butcher of Burma” and leader of the anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya 969 and Ma Ba Tha movements, to a Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) rally in October 2014 and signed an agreement pledging “to make the entire south and Southeast Asian region a peaceful region devoid of all forms of fundamentalist movements, extremisms and civil or international wars” — an effective declaration of war against Muslims.Image courtesy of Colombo Telegraph.
Conviction
The re-arrest itself was the lawful enforcement of a conviction that the Sinhala-Buddhist establishment has spent years trying to evade. In 2016, the Court of Appeal convicted Gnanasara, General Secretary of the ultra-right, fascist Bodu Bala Sean (Buddhist Power Brigade), on four counts of contempt of court, stemming from his January 2016 disruption of proceedings in the Homagama Magistrate’s Court. The charges were damning: he had addressed the court without permission and obstructed its proceedings; he had declared in open court that he would not accept the court’s orders and that the law of the country should not be followed; he had directed the court to grant bail to state intelligence officials who were suspects in a case before it; and he had called the Senior State Counsel appearing for the prosecution an “impotent state officer.” He was sentenced to 19 years of rigorous imprisonment, to be served concurrently over six years. His appeals were finally exhausted when the Supreme Court refused special leave in October 2018.
Pardon
It was the Buddhist establishment itself that then intervened to place him above the law. In May 2019, President Maithripala Sirisena granted Gnanasara a full pardon—a pardon procured, as the Supreme Court’s judgment documents, by the direct requests of the Mahanayake Theros of the Malwathu, Asgiri, and Kotte Chapters of the Siyam Maha Nikaya, together with the Diyawadana Nilame of the Sri Dalada Maligawa. The chief prelates of the Maha Sangha have been lobbying to shield this convicted fascist from the consequences of his crimes since 2018. The present disrobing outcry is not a new eruption; it is the continuation of the same campaign.
Revocation
In September 2026, the Supreme Court—ruling on fundamental rights petitions filed by the Centre for Policy Alternatives and Dr. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, and by Sandhya Ekneligoda, the wife of the missing journalist Prageeth Ekneligoda—declared that pardon unconstitutional and arbitrary. The Court held that Sirisena had acted mechanically, recording no reasons, and had thereby abdicated the exercise of his constitutional power; the pardon was, in the Court’s words, “arbitrary, in violation of the public trust and the rules of natural justice, ultra vires his powers.” The Court declared the pardon null and void, reinstating the conviction and sentence.
Disrobing
It was the application of standard prison standing orders—the disrobing of a convicted prisoner and his placement in civilian attire—that triggered the chauvinist outcry. The demand raised by the Maha Sangha, opposition politicians, and Sinhala chauvinist layers is that imprisoned monks be exempted from the ordinary law. The claim that disrobing falls under ecclesiastical authority (the Sangha Sabha) rather than the prison administration is, in substance, a claim that the Buddhist clergy stands above the criminal justice system—that the state must defer to the Sangha in matters touching its members. President Dissanayake’s rapid capitulation, convening an emergency meeting at the Presidential Secretariat and ordering a review of the legal and prison framework to permit imprisoned monks to wear robes, grants precisely this. It creates a distinct legal accommodation for the clergy that no ordinary prisoner enjoys.
This is not an isolated concession. It follows the government’s earlier pledge to establish separate courts for Buddhist monks, placing them outside the normal legal process. Each step deepens the institutional fusion of the state with Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism. The direction of travel is unmistakable: toward a state in which the Buddhist hierarchy is not merely a privileged social layer but a co-governing authority, and in which the law itself is bent to communal ends.
The campaign against minorities
The significance of this development can only be grasped in the context of the chauvinist campaign already being waged against Tamils and Muslims. The same forces now demanding special legal privilege for monks are the forces that have systematically attacked the democratic rights of the national minorities.
Against the Tamils, the government has moved to prohibit the commemoration of war heroes—the Maaveerar Naal remembrance of those killed in the civil war—arresting Tamil youth for attempting to honor their dead. The demand to suppress Tamil commemoration is a demand to erase the historical experience of the Tamil people, to criminalize their grief and their memory. Last month, the government forcibly removed a newly installed statue of Thileepan—the LTTE cadre who died during a hunger strike in 1987—from a site beside Nallur Kovil, following two weeks of commemorative activities by Tamils. Alongside this runs a campaign against the rights of Tamils over their traditional habitation, the lands of the North and East, which successive governments have sought to open to Sinhala settlement and military occupation.
Against the Muslims, the chauvinist campaign has taken the form of agitation over Muslim attire—the burqa ban and related provocations—and the propagation of conspiracy theories alleging that Muslims are plotting against the Sinhala race. These are not fringe phenomena; they are the stock-in-trade of the very man whose comfort the Maha Sangha now demands the state accommodate. Gnanasara is not a religious figure caught up in a legal technicality. He is a fascist provocateur who has spent his career inciting violence against the Muslim minority. It was his inflammatory speeches at an aggressive rally of the ultra-right, fascist BBS in Dharga Town in June 2014 that helped unleash the anti-Muslim pogroms in Aluthgama and Beruwala, in which chauvinist mobs attacked Muslim homes, businesses, and places of worship, leaving multiple dead and hundreds of families displaced. The Rajapaksa regime of the time actively protected and enabled these fascist elements, censoring media coverage of the atrocities to conceal state complicity. Then, Gnanasara was instrumental in instigating the anti-Muslim pogrom in Digana, Kandy, in early March 2018.
Far from their claim of combating terrorism, Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara and Sinhala chauvinists actively nurtured it—creating the fertile ground of anti-Muslim hatred and violence that Zahran Hashim weaponized to mobilize the 2019 Easter Sunday bombers. This is not merely our analysis; it is the documented finding of the state’s own Presidential Commission of Inquiry. The PCoI Report on the Easter Sunday Attacks (2021) established that Gnanasara’s speeches “did not stop at targeting the Wahhabis ideology but went further targeting the Muslim community in general,” and that “some of his actions and utterances have contributed to Muslim youth taking to extremism and joining Zaharan.” The Commission found it “in evidence that Zaharan used the speeches and actions of the thero to rally support for his cause,” noting that Zahran’s final video—spelling out the reasons for the attack—made explicit reference to Gnanasara’s actions. The Commission concluded that Gnanasara’s conduct “resulted in reciprocal radicalization of Muslim youth,” recommended that the Attorney General consider criminal proceedings against him under the ICCPR Act for his 2013 Maharagama and 2014 Aluthgama speeches, and declared that the BBS “is a threat to religious harmony and that it should be proscribed.”
The chauvinists did not fight extremism; they bred it. Their pogroms, their conspiracy theories, and their relentless dehumanization of the Muslim minority supplied the very material that the bombers’ ideology drew upon. The Easter Sunday bombings, which killed nearly 300 people, were not an external assault on a peaceful society but the harvest of a communal poison that the Sinhala-Buddhist establishment had been cultivating for years—and which it then exploited, in the anti-Muslim witch-hunt that followed, to intensify its persecution of the very community it had victimized.
Gnanasara’s present imprisonment is not the first time the law has caught up with him. On March 28, 2024, the Colombo High Court convicted Gnanasara under Section 291B of the Penal Code for making intentionally offensive, inflammatory, and hate-filled statements against the Islamic faith and the Muslim community during a 2016 press conference in Colombo, sentencing him to four years of rigorous imprisonment and a fine. His present re-arrest, on a charge of contempt of court, is the continuation of a long criminal record of communal incitement. It is for this man—a convicted instigator of religious hatred and communal violence—that the Buddhist establishment now demands a legal accommodation placing the clergy above the law, and it is this demand to which the Dissanayake government has capitulated.
The disrobing affair must be seen as one more front in this same war. The demand that monks be placed above the law is the demand that the Buddhist clergy be recognized as the supreme authority of the Sinhala nation—and that the state enforce that supremacy against the minorities. It is the legal expression of the same ideology that drives communal pogroms, burns mosques, bans the burqa, and forbids Tamils from mourning their dead.
Why the capitulation?
The speed of the government’s surrender is the most revealing fact of all. Dissanayake did not resist, did not even attempt to defend the principle of equality before the law. He convened the Maha Sangha, heard their demands, and ordered the law changed. This is the behavior of a government that knows exactly where its political survival lies—and that is now calculating its position in the shadow of a global crisis of unprecedented dimensions.
President Anura Dissanayake participated in a special discussion with the Maha Sangha representing the three Nikayas at the Presidential Secretariat in the afternoon of Thursday, September, 8. Photo courtesy of President’s official Facebook page.
The JVP/NPP is a right-wing, pro-imperialist party that has jettisoned every election promise to ruthlessly enforce IMF-dictated austerity. It has imposed savage cuts on living standards, aligned itself with US imperialism, and unleashed state repression against workers and students who oppose its agenda. It governs against the interests of the vast majority of the population, and it knows it. Its electoral base is not the working class but the Sinhala petty bourgeoisie and the chauvinist layers that the JVP has cultivated throughout its history.
But the government’s calculations cannot be understood in national isolation. The austerity it is enforcing is not a domestic policy choice; it is the local expression of a world crisis. The eruption of the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran has deepened the global crisis of the capitalist system and enormously escalated the international class struggle, not least within the United States itself. The war, the breakdown of the post-war economic order, and the deepening global recession are driving every imperialist power to make the working class pay for the crisis—and the IMF is the instrument through which that burden is transferred to the toilers of the semi-colonial world. The austerity demands that the JVP/NPP is executing to the letter are the direct product of this global war and economic situation.
This is precisely what makes the government’s position so precarious. The same world crisis that compels it to impose austerity is also generating a surge of class struggle internationally—in the United States, in France, in India—as workers confront the attacks on their living standards. The international class struggle is rising, and the Sri Lankan working class is not insulated from it. On the contrary: the more ruthlessly the government enforces the IMF’s demands, the greater the potential for mass opposition at home. The government knows that the social disillusionment now spreading through the population can, under the impact of the global crisis, rapidly assume an explosive form.
It is against this backdrop that the capitulation to the Maha Sangha must be understood. Facing the growing potential of class struggle, the government calculates that it must appease the Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinist elements to shield its state power from destabilization. The Buddhist clergy is the necessary tool of this strategy: it is the instrument through which the government mobilizes its chauvinist voter base, and—at moments of class struggle—the instrument through which it divides the working class along communal lines. The more dangerous the social situation becomes, the more indispensable this weapon appears to the ruling class.
This is the essential point. The working class of Sri Lanka is Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim. Its unity is the precondition for any struggle against austerity, against the IMF, against the capitalist system itself. The chauvinist campaign—the attacks on Tamil commemoration, the anti-Muslim agitation, and now the elevation of the Buddhist clergy above the law—has one purpose: to prevent that unity, to set Sinhala workers against their Tamil and Muslim brothers and sisters, and thereby to disarm the class as a whole at the very moment when the world crisis is driving it toward struggle.
The danger
The dangers of this development are large, and they are growing. The sequence of events is itself the indictment. A government that was, days ago, enforcing a Supreme Court ruling—a ruling that struck down an unconstitutional pardon and vindicated the fundamental right to equality—has now capitulated to the very forces that ruling was directed against. It has agreed to amend the law so that the convicted fascist it was imprisoning may retain the robes of his office behind bars. There is no concession it will not make, no principle it will not abandon, no minority right it will not sacrifice, if doing so secures its hold on power.
And the timing is no accident. The capitulation comes as the world crisis—the imperialist war against Iran, the deepening global recession, the surge of class struggle in the United States, France, and India—drives the government to enforce IMF austerity to the letter, and thereby drives the Sri Lankan working class toward struggle. It is precisely at such moments that the ruling class reaches for its communal weapon. The Buddhist clergy is the instrument through which the government mobilizes its chauvinist base and, when the class struggle sharpens, divides Sinhala workers from their Tamil and Muslim brothers and sisters. The more dangerous the social situation becomes, the more ruthlessly this weapon will be used.
The working class must draw the correct conclusion. It has no stake in the demand that monks be placed above the law. That demand is a weapon of communal reaction, not a defense of the oppressed. The answer to austerity and to chauvinism alike is the independent political mobilization of the working class—Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim—united against the government and the capitalist system it serves. Only the socialist transformation of society, which abolishes the material basis of all communal and religious oppression, can put an end to the chauvinist poison that the ruling class is now injecting into the body politic with renewed vigor.
The escalating land dispute in the Mylathamadu, Mathavanai and Divulapathana border corridors between the Batticaloa and Polonnaruwa districts has reached an acute crisis. For over 1100 days, Tamil cattle-herding families have maintained a continuous, peaceful protest demanding the restoration of the grazing lands they have traditionally used for their livestock, and an end to the violence of state-backed Sinhalese settlers. Their demands have fallen on deaf ears. Settlers have issued death threats, physically assaulted farmers and systematically driven cattle off the land. The deliberate targeting of livestock with firearms, traps and explosive devices (hakka patas) has produced widespread cow killings — including a major slaughter on Christmas Eve 2020 — crippling local milk production and destroying livelihoods. Despite protests, judicial eviction orders from local courts and international human rights documentation, field-level law enforcement has remained weak, while state authorities have interrogated local journalists attempting to report on the land grabs.
Monday (5), in Divulapathana village, Tamil cattle herders drove around 2,000 cattle across lands cultivated by Sinhala farmers, fulfilling a threat made the previous day allegedly at the instigation of local Tamil MP Shanakiyan Rasamanickam. The incident is a warning of where this crisis is heading: toward an open ethnic confrontation, deliberately manufactured by forces on both sides who have no interest in resolving the underlying land question.
Cattle released onto lands cultivated by Sinhala farmers on October 5, 2026.
A manufactured ethnic conflict
The present crisis did not erupt spontaneously. It is the product of a deliberate, decades-long process of state-sponsored colonisation, of which Mayilathamadu and Mathavanai are only the latest flashpoints.
The grazing lands at issue border the Mandari River, a tributary of the Maduru Oya, on the outskirts of Batticaloa. For generations they have been used by Tamil cattle-herding families from Sithandi, Vantharmolai, Illupaiyadichenai and Murakkadddan Chollai — over a thousand families, by 2023 data, whose sole livelihood is animal husbandry. As early as 1979, 12,000 acres of this grazing land were acquired under the Mahaweli Authority’s System B, which spans the Polonnaruwa and Batticaloa districts. From 2013 onward, Sinhalese settlers from Ampara and Polonnaruwa — including, according to Human Rights Watch, retired soldiers settled with government support and armed with illegal weapons — began occupying the pasturelands. By 2023, approximately 3,150 hectares of pastoral land were under threat, and between 2012 and 2023 some 6,948 head of livestock were killed, injured, disappeared or forcibly captured.
The crisis sharpened decisively in 2020, when the Mahaweli Authority and the then Eastern Province Governor actively encouraged the cultivation of corn and peanuts on the grazing lands. Sinhalese corn cultivators from Polonnaruwa were relocated into the pasture, and the killing of Tamil cattle — shot, hacked with swords, trapped in electric fences, electrocuted — became systematic. The slaughter of Christmas Eve 2020 was only the most notorious episode. By March 2024, Tamil farmers had lodged 36 complaints at the Valachchenai police station; only three were ever filed in court. In January 2021, a case was taken to the Court of Appeal, and the Mahaweli Authority gave an undertaking that the illegal occupants would leave by February 28, 2021. The courts ordered all chena cultivators to vacate by July 21, 2021. The order has never been implemented. In October 2023, even as the President was urged by Batticaloa MPs to halt the encroachment and agreed to remove the illegal settlers, a new Buddha statue was installed on the disputed land under the leadership of a monk and the former Governor. The Tamil farmers have now maintained a continuous protest since December 2023 — over 3 years — without the state lifting a finger.
Mayilathamadu–Mathavanai villagers in Batticaloa held a protest on September 15, 2026, marking the third anniversary of their struggle todefend their democratic right to thecontinued useof pasturelands that have sustained their community for generations. Image courtesy of NorthEasternMonitor.lk.
This is the context in which the NPP government, in power for two years, has refused to engage with the farmers or curb the settlers’ violence, while presenting itself abroad as a progressive administration. A UN-supported report identified 50 unresolved state-citizen land disputes in the Eastern Province between 2020 and 2024 alone. The Centre for Policy Alternatives has documented how the Department of Archaeology, the Mahaweli Authority, the Forest Department and the military have all been deployed to seize land from minority communities, with the active collusion of the Buddhist clergy.
Yet, it is both Sinhala-chauvinist and Tamil nationalist leaders who are turning this agricultural land dispute into an ethnic issue. The issue here concerns the lands required by dairy farmers and chena cultivators — not a Sinhala-Tamil conflict. The land in question is required for cattle herding and shifting cultivation: competing uses of the same resource by two groups of poor rural toilers. The fact that the herders are predominantly Tamil and the cultivators predominantly Sinhalese is a demographic accident of the region’s history, not the essence of the conflict. The essence is the struggle over scarce agricultural land under conditions of capitalist crisis, in which the state has failed to provide water, fertilizer, storage, animal feed or any of the basic conditions of rural production.
This is precisely the kind of dispute that the ruling class and its communalist auxiliaries on both sides are eager to transform into an ethnic conflict. The mechanism is identical to the one the ICFI has documented throughout Sri Lanka’s history: when the working class and rural poor confront the state over their material conditions, the bourgeoisie diverts that confrontation into communal channels. The Sinhala-chauvinist state has done the primary damage — the land clearing, the livestock slaughter, the collusion of the police and the courts, the Buddha statue planted on seized lands. But the Tamil nationalist politicians, who invoke the farmers’ suffering to consolidate their own communal base, are equally incapable of resolving the land question, because they too insist on framing it as an ethnic grievance rather than a class struggle.
The two communalisms
The Sinhala-chauvinist state has done the primary damage, and it continues to do so. The land clearing, the livestock slaughter, the collusion of the police and the courts, the Buddha statue planted on seized pasture — all of this is the state using its power to favour Sinhalese settlers as part of the broader demographic engineering of the North and East, the same project as Gal Oya, Mahaweli and the post-war military colonies. The Mahaweli Authority’s undertaking to the Court of Appeal, the court’s eviction order, the President’s own agreement to remove the illegal settlers — all have been left unimplemented, because the state has no intention of enforcing them. The state that offers land to Sinhalese settlers today will abandon them tomorrow, once their political utility is exhausted. The settlers themselves are pawns: granted land and state protection so long as they serve the demographic project, and left to face the consequences when the conflict they have been used to provoke erupts.
But the Tamil nationalist politicians are equally culpable. The alleged instigation of the cattle drive by MP Shanakiyan Rasamanickam — driving 2,000 cattle across lands cultivated by Sinhala farmers — is not a defence of Tamil herders’ rights. It is a deliberate provocation, designed to inflame ethnic tension and thereby consolidate the Tamil nationalist parties’ political base. The same parties that invoke the farmers’ suffering to demand “international attention and intervention” — that is, the patronage of the imperialist powers — have no program for resolving the land question, because they too insist on framing it as an ethnic grievance rather than a class struggle. The Tamil bourgeoisie has no more interest in resolving the land question than the Sinhala bourgeoisie does. Both need the conflict to persist, because a resolution on class lines — the unity of Sinhala and Tamil toilers against the capitalist state — would expose the bankruptcy of both communalist projects and threaten the privileges of both bourgeoisies.
The land question
These are lands traditionally used by the Tamil people for cattle herding. That historical fact must be recognised. It is part of the democratic rights of the Tamil rural population, and the state’s encroachment upon it — through the Mahaweli System B acquisitions, through the settlement of Sinhalese cultivators, through the collusion of the police and the courts — is an attack on those rights. The Tamil herders of Mayilathamadu and Mathavanai are not “encroachers”; they are the traditional users of these pasturelands, and their dispossession is a crime of the state.
But it is wrong to claim that Tamils possess absolute ownership over the land simply by virtue of their nationality. The Marxist position is precise: the Tamil herders have an inviolable democratic right to the lands they have traditionally used for their livestock, but this is a right of use and of historical habitation — not an exclusive title of ownership flowing from ethnicity. The land question cannot be resolved from an ethnic perspective. The Tamil nationalist demand that the land be gazetted as exclusively Tamil pastureland, and the Sinhala chauvinist demand that it be opened to Sinhalese settlement, are two sides of the same reactionary coin. Both substitute ethnic entitlement for the actual economic question: how is the land to be allocated between dairy farmers and chena cultivators, and how are the productive needs of both to be met?
This is the same principle that applies to the archaeological sites and to the settlement schemes: the democratic right of a historically oppressed people to their traditional lands and neighbourhoods is inviolable, but that right is not a claim of ethnic exclusivity, and it cannot be advanced through the mirror-image communalism of the Tamil nationalists. The Tamil herder deprived of his pasture and the Sinhala cultivator denied water and fertilizer are victims of the same system. Neither can secure his livelihood except through the other’s support. The resolution of the land question lies not in the ethnic contest manufactured by the communalists on both sides, but in the common struggle of the toilers of both communities against the capitalist state that has created the scarcity and then exploited it.
The way forward
Neither the government nor Sinhala chauvinists or Tamil communalists are capable of viewing or resolving this issue in the correct manner. The resolution lies in the independent organisation of the rural toilers themselves, across ethnic lines.
First, independent committees of Sinhala and Tamil farmers — not the state, not the communalist parties — must come forward to negotiate a fair allocation of agricultural land. This is the only mechanism that can address the actual economic dispute, because it is the only mechanism in which the farmers confront each other as producers with common interests rather than as members of hostile ethnic communities. But these committees must be understood for what they are: not merely ad hoc negotiating forums, but the embryonic form of the independent organs of popular power. In them, the toiling masses begin to exercise power directly — to deliberate, to decide, and to act on their own behalf, outside and against the capitalist state and its communalist apparatus.
This is the soviet form in its primary, undeveloped expression: the self-organisation of the exploited, cutting across the ethnic and religious divisions that the ruling class cultivates, and constituting the germ of a new state power. The principle of “all power to the soviets” — the central lesson of the Russian Revolution of 1917 — means precisely this: that the independent organs of the working class and the toiling masses, not the capitalist state, must become the basis of political power. The committees of Sinhala and Tamil farmers, united in struggle against the government for land, water, fertilizer, storage, animal feed and decent living standards, are the first step toward that end. Their development — their extension from the village to the district, from the countryside to the towns, their fusion with the independent committees of the industrial working class — is the path by which the peasant question and the national question can be resolved. Only when the toiling masses, organised in their own independent organs, take political power into their own hands can the land question be settled on a democratic and socialist basis, and the communal politics that exploit it be finally abolished.
Second, the farmers must wage a common struggle against the capitalist government for the necessary facilities — water, fertilizer, storage, animal feed and decent living standards. The land dispute is ultimately a product of the state’s failure to develop the productive forces of agriculture and its use of land as an instrument of communal politics. The farmers’ real enemy is not each other but the capitalist state that has created the scarcity and then exploited it. It is this struggle — not the ethnic contest manufactured by the chauvinists — that will forge the unity of the Sinhala and Tamil toilers. For it is only in the fight against their common oppressor that the farmers of both communities will discover, in practice, that their interests are identical: that the Tamil herder deprived of pasture and the Sinhala cultivator denied water and fertilizer are victims of the same system, and that neither can secure his livelihood except through the other’s support. The independent committees are the instrument of this discovery. Through them, the farmers must formulate their common demands, organise their common actions, and confront the state as a united force — refusing to be divided by the communalist provocations of the government, the Sinhala chauvinists or the Tamil nationalist parties.
Third, the working class must support the farmers and take the lead. The peasant question and the national question cannot be resolved by the peasantry or the petty bourgeoisie alone. They can only be resolved through the struggle for political power by the working class, leading the rural toilers, on a socialist program. This is the core of Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution: the bourgeoisie is organically incapable of resolving the democratic tasks — including the land question and the national question — and these tasks therefore fall to the proletariat.
The working class must fight for political power — to establish a workers’ and farmers’ government — because only through the conquest of state power can the land question, the national question and all other democratic tasks be resolved. This is the perspective the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), theSocialist.lk and the ICFI advance: a workers’ and farmers’ government, the defence of the democratic rights of all communities, and the socialist transformation of society as the only basis on which the land disputes of the North and East — and the communal politics that exploit them — can be finally resolved.
[1] Permanent Revolution and the National Question Today, David North (1993), (16 May 1998) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1998/05/dnkb-m16.html>
[2] The Lure of Land: Peasant Politics, Frontier Colonization and the Cunning State in Sri Lanka, Thiruni Kelegama and Benedikt Korf (2023) Modern Asian Studies 1, Cambridge University Press <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X22000506>
[3] ICG reports detail the militarisation in Sri Lanka’s North, Sampath Perera (24 March 2012) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/03/sril-m24.html>
[4] The Situation in Sri Lanka and the Political Tasks of the Revolutionary Communist League, Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International, David North, Keerthi Balasuriya (19 November 1987) <https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/fi-15-1/05.html>
Can you explain how the US trade deficit and $40 trillion national debt relate to the dollar’s role as world reserve currency, and why that system is now in crisis?
Statement of the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia
Sivarasa Anojan, a Tamil migrant worker from Natpiddimunai in Kalmunai and a graduate of Uva Wellassa University, is now awaiting execution in Saudi Arabia — sentenced to death by an appellate court in Al-Ahsa not for any act of violence, but for a Facebook comment that he reportedly removed within minutes of posting and followed with a public apology. The escalation of his case, from a five-year prison term to a capital sentence, was facilitated at every step by the very institution supposedly charged with protecting him: the Sri Lankan Foreign Ministry. The case lays bare, with brutal clarity, the relationship between the Sri Lankan state and the working people it exports abroad as a source of foreign exchange.
Sivarasa Anojan. Image courtesy of Jaffna Monitor
Anojan was convicted on July 28 on two counts: a cybercrime charge under Article 6 of Saudi Arabia’s Anti-Cyber Crime Law, and a Sharia offense of insulting the Prophet Muhammad. The lower court sentenced him to five years in prison and a fine of three million Saudi riyals — roughly $800,000, an astronomical sum for a migrant labourer. The public prosecutor had demanded a harsher, discretionary ta’zir punishment for the blasphemy charge; the trial judges declined to impose it.
It was at this point that the Sri Lankan state intervened — with catastrophic consequences. According to documents reviewed by Jaffna Monitor, the Foreign Ministry facilitated an appeal even after its own embassy in Riyadh had obtained legal advice describing the chances of success as “extremely low.” No warning was ever recorded to Anojan’s family that, under Saudi procedure, an appeal can increase a sentence — including elevating a prison term to death. The appeal was built entirely on the statutory ceiling of the cybercrime count, a ceiling that did not apply to the blasphemy charge, which carries no upper limit under the Hanbali school of jurisprudence. By reopening the question of whether the punishment was excessive, the appeal placed the entire sentence back in play — including the harsher penalty the prosecutor had sought and the trial court had refused.
On Thursday, the appellate court overturned the prison term and imposed a death sentence.
A ministry that charges the condemned
The family’s treatment by the Sri Lankan state is a study in bureaucratic contempt for the working class. Anojan’s father paid Rs. 1,890,766 — about $6,300 — directly into an official account held in the name of the Foreign Ministry Secretary at the Bank of Ceylon, the deposit slip marked simply “Anojan case.” The ministry sent a copy of the appeal to the father more than three weeks after it was filed, and one day before it was decided — by which time nothing in it could be changed. The family was never told the name of the lawyer who actually appeared at the hearing. And they learned of the death sentence not from their government, but from Anojan himself, who was permitted to telephone home after the hearing.
This is the same state that refuses to protect migrant workers who lose their jobs in Oman. As the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) reported, in January 2024, when a group of Sri Lankan workers who had been thrown out of work gathered outside the embassy in Muscat to demand that their government bring them home, the embassy responded by declaring that it bore “no responsibility” for them because they had entered on tourist visas, and instructed them to pay fines and leave the country. Roughly 80 workers, including 30 women, were arrested by Omani police, while the embassy’s own “safe house,” established purportedly to protect women, was closed to those seeking refuge. The stranded workers were left sleeping on cardboard on the pavement beside a highway, without toilets or sanitary facilities, exposed to extreme heat by day and cold by night, surviving on the charity of fellow workers. When they protested, gangs wielding iron rods attacked them and attempted to drag women away by force — attacks the workers said the embassy supported.
That abandonment took place under the government of Ranil Wickremesinghe; Anojan’s life now hangs in the balance under the JVP/NPP government of Anura Kumara Dissanayake, which inherited the same state apparatus, the same dependence on remittance revenue, and the same contempt for the workers it exports. The government’s diplomacy is not the opposite of abandonment, but the mechanism of it. The political colour of the regime changes, but the treatment of the migrant worker does not — because it is not a matter of individual ministers but of a state that depends on the labour of its citizens abroad while refusing to spend a rupee of its remittance earnings on defending their lives.
The reactionary character of the Saudi regime
The death sentence is not an aberration but an expression of the character of the Saudi state itself — a feudal-capitalist monarchy whose legal system combines medieval Sharia jurisprudence with the repression of an oil oligarchy. In Saudi Arabia, Oman, Jordan and the other Gulf states, Sri Lankan workers — disproportionately women employed as domestic servants — face conditions that amount to modern slave labour. The kafala system binds migrant workers to employers who control their residency and can withhold wages and passports with impunity. The regime’s barbarism toward foreign workers is well documented: it beheaded four Sri Lankan workers in 2007, and in 2013 it executed Rizana Nafeek, a young domestic servant, despite international pleas for clemency. Amnesty International documented that over the ten-year period from 2014 to 2025, foreign nationals accounted for nearly three-quarters of all individuals executed for drug-related crimes.
Anojan’s case carries a further, specific horror. Because blasphemy against the Prophet is prosecuted as a “public right” (al-haqq al-amm), there is no private victim and no family that can grant forgiveness or accept blood money — the route through which governments have previously saved citizens facing execution in the Gulf. Only the Saudi king, by royal order, can halt the sentence. The political establishment’s response — petitions to President Dissanayake and appeals to the Saudi monarchy for “clemency” — is an exercise in futility and self-deception. It begs mercy from the very system that produced the sentence.
Anojan’s case exposes the Sri Lankan State
The case exposes the lie at the heart of the Sri Lankan state’s entire migration policy. Workers from the war-ravaged Northern and Eastern Provinces — among the poorest and most marginalised in the country, affected by the near thirty-year civil war waged by the Sinhala-dominated state against the Tamil people— are driven abroad by the economic devastation imposed at home through IMF austerity, only to be sold into the jurisdiction of a Gulf monarchy where their labour is super-exploited and their lives are legally worthless. The same government that profits from their remittances charges their families for incompetent legal representation, conceals the risks, and abandons them to the executioner.
No appeal to the Sri Lankan government, the Saudi monarchy, or the “international community” can save Anojan or the hundreds of thousands of workers in his position. These are appeals to the very forces responsible for his predicament. Both the Sri Lankan government and the Gulf monarchies profit from this system of exploitation of migrant labour. It is a product of the global capitalist order, in which impoverished workers from South Asia and Africa are exported as cheap labour to serve the Gulf oligarchies, whose own prosperity rests on their labour.
Unite to save Anojan’s life!
Every day that passes brings Sivarasa Anojan closer to the executioner’s blade. The window for a five-judge Bench Supreme Court challenge is a matter of weeks, and it must be used not for quiet diplomacy but for a maximum mobilisation of the working class. The precedent exists: the campaign to free Bogdan Syrotiuk, the Ukrainian socialist imprisoned by the Zelensky regime, demonstrated that when workers, youth, port workers, students and academics across the world raise a single voice — through international pickets at embassies and consulates, through statements from factory floors and rank-and-file committees, through public meetings and a relentless public exposure of the injustice — the ruling classes who imagine their victims are invisible are forced to reckon with the organised power of the class they exploit. The same method must now be applied to save Anojan.
The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia ( SLAA) and theSocialist.LK call on every worker and young person to demand, immediately and unconditionally, that the Saudi court reverse its death sentence and that Anojan be freed and returned home. Let no one be deceived that this can be left to the Foreign Ministry that charged his family Rs. 1.89 million for an appeal that killed him, or to the politicians who now posture over his fate while begging mercy from the very monarchy that condemned him. Pressure must be exerted on the Saudi authorities and on the Sri Lankan government through the only force they fear: the mass mobilisation of the working class, in Sri Lanka, in the Gulf, and across the world. The only force capable of defending migrant workers is the organised power of the working class itself. The unity of Sri Lankan, Indian, Bangladeshi, Filipino, Nigeria and all migrant workers in the Gulf, in struggle against both their home governments and the Gulf regimes, is the precondition for stopping these executions and, ultimately, for abolishing the system of exploitation that compels workers to sell their lives into servitude abroad. We must build an international campaign — a campaign of class struggle, not of bourgeois dignitaries — to save Anojan’s life. His life depends on it, and so does the defence of every migrant worker who has been abandoned to the barbarism of the Gulf monarchies by the state that sold their labour for remittances.
We must briefly clarify our position against false moralists and Sinhala chauvinist voices who falsely accuse us of being lenient toward the LTTE — claiming that we only highlight crimes committed by the military of the southern Sinhala state during the Northern-Eastern war, while failing to report the separate crimes of the LTTE.
We all know that the LTTE committed brutal war crimes. Nowhere have we denied this. We have every reason to reject those crimes, along with the reactionary political program and ideology that motivated them — and we do so unequivocally, completely, and without political qualification. The LTTE’s bombings of Sinhala civilians, the massacre of thirty-three Buddhist monks and novices at Aranthalawa in 1987, the ethnic cleansing of seventy-five thousand Muslims from the Northern Province in 1990, the assassination of political opponents and trade unionists, the abduction of Tamil children as soldiers, and the brutal suppression of every independent socialist and democratic tendency within Tamil society — these were all political crimes against the working class. We condemn them as such without reservation.
A protester lights a ceremonial lamp at a rally organized by the Association of Relatives of the Enforced Disappeared in the North and East, held in Jaffna on 30 August 2026 as part of the “Long Road to Justice” conference marking the International Day of the Disappeared. Image courtesy of Kumara Kana.
However, merely listing those crimes accomplishes nothing politically. We are a political organization — a Trotskyist political leadership being built as the socialist vanguard of the working class of Sri Lanka and South Asia, not an NGO compiling human rights reports. Our task is not to demonstrate moral equivalence between two sets of criminals. Our task is to explain to the working class the class nature of those crimes, who they served, and how the working class must respond to them.
The LTTE’s Terror was Strategy, Not Madness
The LTTE committed all these crimes in pursuit of a specific political program: Tamil ethnic separatism — the establishment of a separate pro-imperialist capitalist state in which the Tamil bourgeoisie and international finance capital could exploit Tamil labor. The primary threat to this program was not the Sri Lankan military. It was the possibility that Tamil workers and poor living in the North, East, and Colombo would unite with the Sinhala working class to find a common solution to the national question on the basis of class struggle. That unity — the unity of Sinhala and Tamil workers against their common class enemy — was the one development the LTTE could not survive politically.
Therefore, the LTTE systematically worked to prevent it. Division was its political oxygen. Instilling deep-seated hatred between Tamil and Sinhala communities was not a byproduct of its strategy — it was central to it. This is why the LTTE never made a class appeal to Sinhala workers. An ethnic nationalist organization that defines the Sinhala nation as the enemy is structurally incapable of making such an appeal. Instead, it pursued the deliberate terrorization of the Sinhala population: bomb attacks in crowded Colombo streets and railway stations, massacres of Sinhala and Muslim farming communities in border villages, the attack on the Temple of the Tooth Relic — the most sacred site of Sinhala Buddhist culture. As a separatist movement, it also carried out these attacks to demographically consolidate its claimed territory through ethnic cleansing.
These were not mad acts or simple reprisals. They were calculated political decisions by a leadership that understood — with cold clarity — that communal terror served its separatist program. Every bomb on a Colombo commuter train pushed Sinhala workers who might otherwise have questioned the war back into the arms of the ruling class. Every border village massacre made it politically impossible for Sinhala farmers to regard their Tamil neighbors as anything but “Tigers” or “terrorists.” This was the deliberate, strategic manufacture of hatred — the substitution of ethnic terror for class politics, the substitution of communal division for working-class unity.
A Political Symbiosis: LTTE and the Southern Ruling Class
On the other hand — and this is the decisive political point that only a Marxist analysis makes visible — escalating Sinhala-Tamil alienation was precisely what the ruling class in the South also required. In fact, the LTTE committing these crimes was exactly what the southern ruling class needed.
Following the so-called independence of 1948, the political program pursued by successive Colombo governments was built upon anti-Tamil and anti-Muslim chauvinism deployed systematically against the unity of working and oppressed people. The Citizenship Act of 1948 stripped a million Tamil plantation workers of their voting rights. The 1956 Sinhala-only language act institutionalized Tamil national oppression. The 1972 constitution entrenched Buddhist supremacism. And when the Sinhala working class demonstrated its revolutionary potential — in the 1953 hartal that brought workers of all communities together and drove the UNP government to its knees — the ruling class built the SLFP on a Sinhala chauvinist platform specifically to prevent that unity from repeating itself. When public sector workers launched the largest general strike in Sri Lankan history in 1980 demanding decent wages, Jayawardene sacked 100,000 of them — and then organized the 1983 pogrom that burned Tamil Colombo and ignited the full-scale civil war.
Sri Lankan capitalists learned the “divide and rule” method from British imperialists — as the catastrophic partition of India demonstrated — and applied it with devastating consistency. The LTTE executed this exact political method in its most barbaric form. Tactically, by terrorizing Sinhala workers and farmers into viewing every Tamil person as a “Tiger,” it trapped Tamil youth within a separatist political dead end, cutting them off from Sinhala class allies and conscripting their anger and sacrifice into its military battalions. Strategically, it handed the southern ruling class precisely the communal polarization it required to suppress working-class unity, justify military budgets, silence anti-war opposition, and brand every critic of the war as a terrorist sympathizer.
The youth and workers who carry this alienation forward today — who fill Sinhala chauvinist social media with hostility toward Tamil Mullivaikkal commemorations, who cheer the “War Heroes” mythology — are victims of this despicable politics jointly produced by both the LTTE and the southern ruling class. The LTTE’s terrorism and the ruling class’s chauvinism were not opposing forces. They were a political symbiosis, each sustaining the other’s grip on their respective populations at the expense of working people on both sides. These dynamics become clearly visible only within a Marxist analysis.
Indeed, part of the LTTE’s separatist politics was to sever the Sinhala people from the Tamil people through terror, and thereby to feed Sinhala chauvinism. Those who continue to advance this Sinhala chauvinism against the Tamil people today are merely carrying forward the political strategy first perfected jointly by the southern capitalist class and the LTTE. In this precise historical sense, the LTTE’s political paternity belongs to the Colombo ruling class — it was the monstrous product of a ruling class that manufactured racist war as its answer to the 1980 general strike and the threat of Sinhala-Tamil working-class unity.
Accountability Exposes the State that Protected the Criminals
Now, we say clearly: if there are LTTE leaders responsible for those crimes, they must be held accountable. And here we must be precise about what the current situation actually is.
The LTTE’s top political and military leadership — Prabhakaran, Soosai, Charles, Balasingham and others — are dead, killed in 2009 or before. But not all responsible figures are dead. Karuna Amman — Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan — commanded LTTE forces in the Eastern Province and bears command responsibility for atrocities committed there, including the Aranthalawa massacre. Pillayan — Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan — operating after 2004 defection as an anti-LTTE paramilitary under the protection of Sri Lankan military intelligence, led pro-government paramilitary forces responsible for child soldier abductions and political assassinations. KP — Kumaran Pathmanathan — managed LTTE arms procurement and international networks. All three are alive today.
And here lies the decisive exposure of the entire system: the southern Sinhala supremacist state that demands we “also” discuss LTTE crimes is the same state that gave Karuna Amman a diplomatic passport, appointed Pillayan as Chief Minister of the Eastern Province, and integrated these figures into its own political apparatus — shielding them from any accountability for their crimes, including Aranthalawa. Any genuine inquiry into LTTE war crimes would therefore expose not only the state’s criminal complicity in protecting Karuna and Pillayan — it would expose the state’s own political responsibility for producing the LTTE through the 1983 pogrom and decades of systematic anti-Tamil oppression, and would drag into the light its own direct war crimes at Mullivaikkal, Chemmani, Mannar, and across thirty years of military occupation. The southern state is not prepared for that. This is precisely why no such inquiry will ever be permitted by the Colombo ruling class — and why they suppress the truth about both sets of crimes simultaneously.
The Political Question, Not the Moral Ledger
The state in the South is a political and repressive institution — not simply a collection of individuals who committed crimes. The massacres, the enforced disappearances, the mass graves at Chemmani — these were not accidental overreaches. They were the structural implementation of state terror, deployed to defend the capitalist order. That state stands ready to commit these crimes again today and tomorrow — not only against Tamil people, but against the Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim working class as a whole, as it implements IMF austerity, criminalizes strikes, and prepares its military apparatus for deployment against workers who resist.
Therefore, what matters to us is not aligning lists of crimes to demonstrate that “both sides are morally wrong.” The most important matter is not the moral question but the political question. Morally speaking, all these crimes are indeed crimes — we condemn them all. But political accountability rests fundamentally with the Sinhala supremacist capitalist state of the South. That is the living institution. That is the armed apparatus. That is the class enemy that remains intact, shielding its own criminals, and threatening the working class today.
No mainstream media outlet in the South goes beyond glorifying “war heroes.” All southern media maintain silence regarding the crimes committed by state forces during the war in the North and East. We are among the very few exposing this truth — at political cost, as the history of our movement’s persecution by both the state and the LTTE demonstrates. Three Revolutionary Communist League members were murdered by the JVP. Five SEP members were kidnapped by the LTTE itself. We have never capitulated to either.
Therefore, to the Sinhala chauvinists who challenge us to write about LTTE crimes as a test of our “independence,” we say: admit that the southern Sinhala government’s military committed war crimes in the North and East. Demand that the southern mainstream media and every government since 2009 expose those crimes one by one. Demand the prosecution of Karuna for Aranthalawa — which your own government prevented. But we tell you: neither you nor the ruling class you serve, consciously or unconsciously, can ever do that. Because doing so would expose the entire system you are defending.
Highlighting the crimes of the southern state does not negate the crimes of the LTTE. In fact, precisely because the southern state attempts to cover up its own crimes and conceal the truth, it has been impossible to establish any genuine accountability mechanism for the crimes committed by the LTTE leadership and its surviving affiliates. To do so would require acknowledging the war crimes of the southern state, as well as the criminal complicity of the state in the post-defection crimes of Karuna and Pillayan. The southern state is not prepared for that — which is why it suppresses the truth about all of it. That is why we must stand for the truth and expose it against every attempt at suppression.
The Only Way Forward: International Socialist Unity
Our primary goal is to organize workers and oppressed people to prevent this country from being pushed into further separatist extremes, communal killings, and new crimes. Seventeen years after the war’s end, with 23 percent of the population in poverty, with Tamil land still under military occupation, with the disappeared still unaccounted for, and with the JVP/NPP government simultaneously hosting “War Heroes Day” ceremonies and implementing IMF austerity that devastates Sinhala and Tamil workers alike — the Tamil national question is not resolved. It has intensified. As long as the southern capitalist state cannot resolve it, Tamil nationalist capitalist leaders will attempt to bring separatism back to the forefront by exploiting the genuine, unaddressed grievances of the Tamil masses.
To prevent this, the working class must be continuously educated about the true nature of this capitalist state and its apparatuses of repression — that this state is established against the oppressed people and workers regardless of ethnicity, religion, or caste, the very divisions the ruling class manufactures, maintains, and capitalizes on; that its military is its repressive machine; that the “War Heroes” it glorifies are the war criminals it protects. The state’s crimes must not be buried by time or repression. They must be brought to the surface and remembered — because new generations cannot understand the true nature of the existing state without that history. Sinhala workers, farmers, and youth must properly understand this political reality to prevent this country from heading toward ethnic massacres once again. And Tamil workers, farmers, and youth must understand that justice for Mullivaikkal, for the disappeared, for the occupied lands — cannot come from Tamil nationalist parties representing the Tamil elite, nor from imperialist tribunals serving geopolitical interests, but only from the unified struggle of the working class of all communities.
The ruling political class, the Buddhist hierarchy aligned with the state, the media ecosystem serving ruling-class interests, and their racist proxy organizations are once again preparing to re-ignite anti-Tamil and anti-Muslim communalism. The JVP/NPP government’s limited and cosmetic gestures toward Tamil grievances — its carefully calibrated electoral manoeuvres designed to attract Tamil votes while maintaining the full apparatus of military occupation and suppression — are being weaponized by these forces as “proof” of capitulation to the Tamil diaspora and betrayal of the Sinhala nation. This propaganda is a deliberate falsification. The Dissanayake government has not resolved a single fundamental Tamil democratic demand: the military occupies Tamil land, the disappeared remain unaccounted for, and the Prevention of Terrorism Act remains intact. What the chauvinists present as “concessions” are the flimsiest of facades behind which the full machinery of Sinhala supremacist state power continues to operate. As the effects of the global economic crisis and imperialist war preparations encroach upon the country — forcing ever more severe austerity and driving an explosive growth of working-class struggles that the Dissanayake government has artificially suppressed with the collaboration of the trade union bureaucracy — the ruling class will inevitably resort to all its tried and tested methods of dividing the working class along ethnic and religious lines. The working class and youth of all nationalities must be alert to the rising fascistic tendencies that the post-war militarization, the “War Heroes” patriotismmythology, and the systematic cultivation of Sinhala-Buddhist supremacist organizations by successive governments have bred within Sri Lankan society — tendencies now finding their most visible expression in the social media campaigns targeting Tamil and Muslim communities, and which the ruling class will not hesitate to mobilize as organized street violence when the deepening economic crisis and the explosion of working-class struggles demand it.
To accomplish these tasks, we are building a revolutionary socialist leadership under the international socialist perspective — the perspective of the Fourth International, founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938, and carried forward by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). It is only under such a perspective that youth and workers in the North, South, and East can recognize past crimes and pain, unite against the common class enemy — the capitalist ruling class and the system it defends — and fight together for a Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Tamil Eelam as part of a Federation of Socialist Republics of South Asia, the perspective advanced by the ICFI in November 1987. Only under this framework, which resolves the Tamil national question through working-class power rather than communal partition or capitalist statehood, will there be no room for renewed separatism, no justification for new massacres, and genuine justice for all victims of this war.
Join us in this struggle. We are the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) and we publish theSocialist.lk.
Statement by the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA)
Sent to the Pervomaisk City District Court (inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua) and the Mykolaiv Court of Appeal (inbox@mka.court.gov.ua), with a copy to the World Socialist Web Site (freebogdan@wsws.org)
Bogdan Syrotiuk, April 2023
The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), fighting among the working class and youth to build the revolutionary leadership in South Asia, in solidarity with the international socialist perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), condemns in the strongest terms the fascistic verdict handed down on August 10, 2026, by a district court in the Nikolaev region sentencing Bogdan Syrotiuk—a 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist, opponent of the US-NATO war against Russia, and leading member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists—to 15 years in prison on the charge of “high treason under martial law.” We demand the immediate annulment of this verdict and Bogdan’s unconditional release.
Bogdan was arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine on April 25, 2024, on the unsubstantiated allegation that he was an agent of the Russian state. More than two years later, not a shred of evidence has ever been produced for that claim. What was in fact placed before the court was a set of six articles published on the World Socialist Web Site and a 2023 May Day speech, “For the Unity of the Working Class of Russia and Ukraine!” These writings called for the international unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers against the war launched by the Putin regime and prosecuted as a US-NATO proxy conflict; they exposed the Zelensky government’s rehabilitation of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and the Waffen-SS Galicia Division; and they documented the dismantling of elections and opposition politics in Ukraine. None of this constitutes treason under any legal standard that retains a shred of meaning. It is political speech, protected in principle by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Ukraine is a signatory.
The state’s own forensic institutions could not sustain the case. A 65-page report by the veteran Ukrainian criminologist Yuri Irkhin found nothing in Bogdan’s writings amounting to propaganda for Russian aggression. When the court ordered a second, state-directed examination in the hope of a different result, even that body could identify no call for the overthrow of the government, no advocacy of the seizure of power, and no support for the alteration of Ukraine’s borders. The court disregarded its own experts. It disregarded the defense. It disregarded the law. What was handed down on August 10 was not a judicial verdict but a political directive from the Zelensky regime, aimed—as the judgment itself half-admits in citing the “socially dangerous consequences” of Bogdan’s positions—not at any act of espionage but at the growth of antiwar sentiment among Ukrainian workers and soldiers. Opinion polling in 2025 found 69 percent of Ukrainians favoring a negotiated end to the war, a complete reversal from 2022, while more than 300,000 criminal cases have been opened against Ukrainian soldiers for desertion since the invasion began. It is this mounting revolt from below, not any threat from Moscow, that the Zelensky dictatorship is moving to suppress through the imprisonment of Bogdan Syrotiuk.
The character of the regime that has produced this verdict must be stated plainly. Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidential term expired in May 2024. He rules today, more than two years later, by decree, under martial law, with elections suspended indefinitely. Communist parties and symbols have been banned since 2015. In 2022 the government suspended eleven opposition parties, subsequently banning outright the largest opposition bloc in parliament. The World Socialist Web Site itself has been blocked inside Ukraine since June 2024. Some 20,000 criminal cases have been opened under Ukraine’s treason and collaboration statutes, laws that Human Rights Watch has described as dangerously broad and vague, under which people who performed emergency services, construction and garbage removal in occupied territory have been prosecuted as traitors. The United Nations Human Rights Office reported as recently as September 2025 that it continues to document torture and ill-treatment of detainees in Ukrainian custody. The Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee has described conditions in Ukrainian pretrial facilities as potentially inhuman and degrading. A fifteen-year sentence inside this system, for a defendant whose health was already poor at the time of his arrest and who has for over two years been denied urgently needed medical care, is nothing less than a sentence of death by degrees.
We in Sri Lanka and South Asia have no difficulty recognizing this method of rule, because we have lived through its variants ourselves. The Sri Lankan state waged a communal civil war for decades under the banner of “national security,” using laws such as the Prevention of Terrorism Act to criminalize dissent, hold detainees without trial, and, in the war’s final phase, to carry out mass atrocities against the Tamil population that the state and its apologists continue to deny to this day. The Dissanayake-led JVP-NPP government, which came to power promising a break from this history, has instead deepened the IMF-dictated austerity program inherited from its predecessors, maintained the repressive apparatus of the state largely intact, and continued to suppress the democratic and social rights of workers, plantation labor, students, and the Tamil and Muslim minorities. Across South Asia, from the communal-nationalist project of Hindutva in India to military and civilian authoritarianism elsewhere in the region, the ruling classes respond to deepening economic crisis and mass social opposition not with concessions but with the criminalization of left-wing and antiwar politics. The persecution of Bogdan Syrotiuk is a sharp expression of a universal tendency of capitalism in its terminal, imperialist stage: as war and austerity generate irrepressible opposition from below, the ruling classes everywhere reach for dictatorship.
This is why the case of Bogdan Syrotiuk cannot be treated as a matter internal to Ukraine, to be left to the discretion of a court system that has already demonstrated, in the words of the World Socialist Web Site, its fascist contempt for the most basic democratic rights. It is a test for the international working class as a whole, including the working class and youth of Sri Lanka and South Asia. The imperialist powers that have armed and financed the Zelensky regime throughout this war—the United States above all, alongside the NATO powers and their allies—bear direct political responsibility for a war being escalated toward direct confrontation with Russia and, ultimately, toward a wider conflagration that already touches Iran, Venezuela, Lebanon and the flashpoints of the Indo-Pacific. Workers in Sri Lanka and across South Asia have a direct stake in this fight, both because the same imperialist powers that bankroll repression in Kyiv dictate the terms of austerity and militarization pursued by our own governments, and because the defense of Bogdan Syrotiuk is inseparable from the defense of the right of socialists everywhere—including in Colombo, Jaffna, Mumbai, Dhaka, Karachchi, and every other city of this region—to organize the working class against war, communalism and capitalist exploitation without fear of imprisonment.
Bogdan Syrotiuk’s only crime was to tell the truth: that this is an imperialist war, that Ukrainian and Russian workers share a common class enemy in their respective ruling classes, and that the celebration of Nazi collaborators as national heroes is a crime against historical memory. For this he faces fifteen years prison sentence. A 15-year sentence in Ukraine’s prison system, where overcrowding, denial of medical care, and deaths in custody are documented by the Council of Europe and the United Nations, is a death sentence. Bogdan, whose health was already poor at the time of his arrest, has been denied urgently needed medical treatment for over two years. He suffers from diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and the prison administration’s deliberate refusal to provide dental treatment — causing him severe, unrelenting pain — risks chronic infections that, left untreated, can lead to sepsis and death. Every day he remains behind bars is a threat to his life.
We call on the Pervomaisk City District Court and the Mykolaiv Court of Appeal to annul this verdict without delay and to order Bogdan Syrotiuk’s immediate and unconditional release. We call on workers, students, trade unionists, lawyers, intellectuals, artists and all defenders of democratic rights in Sri Lanka and throughout South Asia to take up this case as their own: to pass resolutions in their unions, workplaces, universities and organizations demanding Bogdan’s freedom, and to join the international campaign being built by the International Committee of the Fourth International.
Overturn the verdict. Free Bogdan Syrotiuk now!
Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), in solidarity with the international socialist perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International
The Muslim Health workers who were subjected to racialist vilification and institutional discrimination at the Kalmunai North Base Hospital . Photo obtained from social media.
Since last week, a chauvinist campaign has swept across Sri Lankan social media, targeting newly recruited Muslim female health workers and nursing officers at Kalmunai North Base Hospital and other state institutions. The immediate trigger was their wearing of the headscarf as part of their professional uniform. Hospital management barred them from duty, citing rigid uniform codes. Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist networks on Facebook seized on the issue, with Sinhala youth posting fascistic slogans demanding the exclusion of Muslim women from public-sector healthcare. The matter escalated to Parliament on August 18–20, with Health Minister Dr. Nalinda Jayatissa chairing an emergency meeting alongside Muslim and Tamil MPs, and affected workers filing complaints with the Human Rights Commission.
The position of the working class on this question is clear. Muslim nurses have the democratic right to wear the headscarf as part of their professional attire. The campaign to strip them of this right is not a defence of “uniformity” or “secularism” — it is an expression of the Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism [*] constitutionally entrenched in the Sri Lankan capitalist state, which has for decades used ethnic and religious divisions to fracture the working class. It is the same state that has designed worker uniforms with callous disregard to the multi-ethnic interests of the working class of the island and forcibly imposes the same upon them. Defending the Muslim community against state attack and fighting internal reaction are not contradictory — they are two sides of the same class struggle, and both require the revolutionary unity of the working class across ethnic lines.
The defence of this right, however, cannot be separated from the broader fight against all forms of oppression — including the patriarchal structures within all communities — and cannot be entrusted to the Muslim bourgeois parties that have consistently subordinated the interests of Muslim workers to their own deals with the ruling elite.
Below, we publish our response to an opinion piece made against this racist campaign by Muslim content writer Shifana Niyas. Her piece raises issues that go well beyond the immediate uniform controversy — the nature of the Sinhala-Buddhist state, the question of national sovereignty, and the relationship between communal oppression and gender oppression within minority communities. On each of these questions, her analysis leads to conclusions that objectively serve the interests of the Muslim bourgeoisie, not the Muslim working class.
Niyas directs her fire at the chauvinist campaign against Muslim nurses and correctly points to the Sinhala-Buddhist nation-state as the framework within which this oppression operates. But she never identifies the class roots of that state. Instead, she substitutes ethnic categories for class analysis: the problem is “Sinhala men and women,” and the solution is Muslim “sovereignty.” From this flows a series of conclusions that objectively serve the interests of the Muslim bourgeoisie, not the Muslim working class.
Her central thesis is that “the enemy of Muslim women is not the Muslim man. The enemy is the Sinhala men and women.” This formulation replaces class analysis with ethnic bloc-thinking. It erases the class divisions that exist within both the Sinhala and Muslim communities. The Sinhala worker who has been systematically poisoned by decades of state-sponsored chauvinism is not the same as the Sinhala capitalist politician who constitutionalised Buddhism as the state religion. The Muslim landlord or businessman who cuts deals with the major bourgeois parties is not the same as the Muslim nurse facing discrimination. When Niyas declares an entire ethnic group — men and women — the enemy, she is doing exactly what Sinhala chauvinists do: treating an ethnic community as a homogeneous bloc. This is not a radical analysis; it is the mirror image of the chauvinism she opposes.
Her assertion that “Muslim men will defend Muslim women regardless of the reasons” and that the struggle against Muslim patriarchy is “not a Sinhala problem” is particularly reactionary. It subordinates the fight against gender oppression to communal solidarity. It tells Muslim women that their struggles within their own community must be silenced in the name of ethnic unity. This is not a defence of Muslim women — it is an attempt to conscript them into a nationalist project that leaves patriarchal structures intact.
But there is a deeper issue here. Niyas treats Muslim patriarchy as an internal communal affair that outsiders have no business addressing. This is the logic of every bourgeois-nationalist tendency: defend the community against external attack and leave internal hierarchies untouched. The working class has a fundamentally different approach. The oppression of women — in all communities — is rooted in the material foundations of class society: the privatised family, women’s exclusion from social production, and the property relations that turn women into dependents. The fight against Muslim patriarchal structures is therefore not a diversion from the fight against Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism — it is the same fight, because both forms of oppression are sustained by the capitalist system. The program of the working class fights for the complete social, legal and economic equality of women: equal pay, the right to work, socialised child care, reproductive freedom, and the full participation of women in political life. These demands apply to Muslim women no less than to Sinhala or Tamil women — and they can only be won through the common struggle of working women and men across all communities. When Muslim women workers fight against patriarchal controls within their own families and communities, they are not weakening the struggle against Sinhala chauvinism — they are strengthening it, by building the independent political consciousness and organisation of the working class as a whole. A movement that tells Muslim women to set aside their own oppression in the name of communal unity is a movement that will never free them from either.
This brings us to the question of national self-determination, properly understood. The working class of every oppressed nationality has the democratic right to determine its own affairs — including the right to wage the struggle against reactionary cultural and patriarchal practices within its own community. But this struggle cannot be carried out in isolation, under the banner of communal identity. It must be waged in conscious solidarity with the working class of all other nationalities, under the leadership of the united revolutionary movement. The Sinhala-Buddhist state has no right whatsoever to intervene in the internal life of the Muslim community — not on the question of dress, not on the question of personal law, not on any question. When the bourgeois state claims to “liberate” Muslim women from Muslim men, as it does with the nursing uniform controversy, it is not advancing women’s rights. It is using women’s oppression as a pretext to assert Sinhala-Buddhist domination. The working class as a whole — Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim — must oppose such interventions unconditionally. But this defence of the community against the chauvinist state does not mean suspending the class struggle within the community. On the contrary: the most powerful blow that Muslim workers can strike against Sinhala chauvinism is to build their own independent political organisation, break with the Muslim bourgeois leadership, and join with Sinhala and Tamil workers in the common fight against capitalism — the source of all national and gender oppression. Defending the Muslim community against state attack and fighting internal reaction are not contradictory — they are two sides of the same class struggle, and both require the revolutionary unity of the working class across ethnic lines.
Then we come to Niyas’s programmatic conclusion: the problem is that Muslims lack “sovereign status” in Sri Lanka. This is the language of bourgeois nationalism, not of working-class emancipation. The demand for Muslim “sovereignty” inevitably means a separate Muslim state — or at minimum, a territorially based Muslim political authority. This is the same logic that produced the LTTE’s demand for Tamil Eelam: the conviction that the only solution to ethnic oppression is for each ethnic group to have its own state. History has delivered its verdict on this program. Twenty-six years of communal war between the Sri Lankan state and the LTTE produced nothing but devastation for ordinary Tamil and Sinhala working people, while the bourgeoisies on both sides entrenched their power.
The real enemy is not “Sinhala men and women.” It is the capitalist ruling class that has, since 1948, systematically used Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism to divide working people along ethnic and religious lines. The Sinhala-only language policy, the constitutional enshrinement of Buddhism, the discriminatory university quotas — all of these were measures consciously adopted by the bourgeoisie to prevent the emergence of a united working-class movement. The 1953 hartal demonstrated the power of workers when they fight on class lines, across ethnic divisions. The ruling class has spent the seven decades since doing everything in its power to ensure that never happens again.
The Muslim bourgeois parties — the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress and others — have played their own role in this. They have formed alliances with successive governments, from the UNP to the SLFP to the Rajapaksa regime, trading communal representation for a share of the spoils for the Muslim elite. They have no interest in mobilising ordinary Muslims in a common struggle with Sinhala and Tamil workers, because that would threaten the capitalist system on which their own privileges depend. Niyas’s call for Muslim “sovereignty” — for Muslims to “politically organise and resist” as Muslims — gives legitimacy to precisely these bourgeois forces.
The only way to defeat anti-Muslim chauvinism is to build a united movement of the working class — Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim — on a socialist program. The defence of Muslim health workers’ right to wear the hijab cannot be separated from the defence of all democratic rights for all working people, which in turn cannot be achieved without the overthrow of capitalism itself. The demand is not for Muslim sovereignty, but for the unity of the working class in the fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government and a United Socialist States of Sri Lanka, as part of the international socialist revolution. That is the perspective we, the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), advance in solidarity with the perspective the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) fights for — the only perspective that offers a way out of the endless cycle of communal violence and oppression.
The root of all injustices against minority nationalities is the Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinist capitalist state. Any minority-nationalist program against it only strengthens that very state. Workers of all nationalities, unite and fight against the oppressive state and all forms of backwardness!
[*] An explanatory note on terms — Racism, Communalism and Sinhala-Buddhist Chauvinism:
Racism is the ideology that divides humanity into superior and inferior groups on the basis of supposedly biological characteristics, and demands the domination of the former over the latter. It emerged as a distinct doctrine with the rise of capitalism from the sixteenth century onward, elaborated by philosophers, scientists and statesmen to justify the transatlantic slave trade, colonial plunder and the subjugation of entire peoples. Its hallmark is the claim that inequality is inscribed in nature — that the inferiority of the oppressed group is a fact of blood and bone, not of history.
Communalism is the political mobilisation of religious or ethnic identity as the basis for organising political life and defining relations between communities within a single state. In the South Asian context, it treats religious communities — Hindus and Muslims in India; Sinhala-Buddhists, Tamils and Muslims in Sri Lanka — as monolithic, mutually hostile blocs whose interests are inherently antagonistic. Every member of a community is presumed to share a common political stake that overrides class divisions; a Muslim worker and a Muslim landlord are treated as having the same “Muslim interests.” The political program of communalism is the capture or retention of state power by one community at the expense of others.
The political program of communalism is the capture or retention of state power by one community at the expense of others. This is not a matter of prejudice alone — it is a program for the organisation of the state itself. The communalist conceives of the state as the property and instrument of his own community. Other communities are to be tolerated, at best, as second-class citizens, permanently excluded from the levers of power. The entire constitutional and legal apparatus — language policy, religious establishment, citizenship laws, employment quotas, the regulation of personal law and attire — is systematically designed to codify and enforce the supremacy of one community over all others. When this domination is challenged, the communalist does not appeal to democratic rights or legal remedies; he resorts to the mob and the pogrom, to the burning of homes and businesses, to the physical expulsion or liquidation of the minority — confident that the state he has captured will shield him from consequence. Communalism is therefore not a “cultural” or “religious” phenomenon. It is a political program of the bourgeoisie of the dominant community, which presents its own class rule as the collective interest of the entire community in order to secure itself against both the rival bourgeoisies of other communities and, above all, the united opposition of the working class.
The two ideologies differ in their raw material: racism constructs hierarchy around biology; communalism constructs it around religion, language and ethnicity. But they are identical in their social function. Both construct the minority as an alien, threatening “other”; both attribute inherent inferiority; both demand subordination or exclusion from public life; both produce pogroms, discriminatory laws, economic marginalisation and state violence. And both are weapons of the bourgeoisie, deployed to fracture the working class, prevent the emergence of a unified class movement, and provide a scapegoat for the social misery that capitalism itself creates.
Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism is the specific, state-codified form that communalism takes in Sri Lanka. It does not require a doctrine of biological race — Sinhalese and Muslims are not distinguishable by skin colour or physiognomy — but it operates through identical mechanisms. The constitutional enshrinement of Buddhism, the Sinhala-only language policy, the discriminatory treatment of Muslim personal law and attire, and the periodic unleashing of anti-Muslim and anti-Tamil mob violence are the institutional expressions of a chauvinism that functions, in practice, exactly as racism does. The raw material is communal prejudice; the finished product is a chauvinist state. The working class fights both with the same weapon: the revolutionary unity of workers across all communal and racial lines against the capitalist system that breeds them.
The claim that an ethnic minority is violating the rights of the ethnic majority under a Sinhala-Buddhist supremacist constitutional framework and chauvinist political hegemony is false. It is nothing more than fear-mongering designed to racially intimidate minorities. Neither Muslims nor Tamils possess the state power to intimidate or discriminate against Sinhala-Buddhists. Their actions are strictly defensive reactions against an oppressive capitalist state. The chauvinist who howls that his “rights” are under threat is not defending a majority under siege; he is demanding that the state he controls crush a minority that has no state of its own. The majority’s “grievance” is the grievance of the oppressor who resents the very existence of the oppressed.
……
Below we reproduce the opinion piece by Shifana Niyas, posted on her Facebook on 21 August, to which the above is a response.
“What we are witnessing today is an epic Sinhala patriarchal meltdown over the issue of the Muslim nursing uniform. One can also see how Sinhala women contribute to this conversation and indirectly strengthen their patriarchy. My position that Sinhala men and women are two sides of the same oppressive face of the Sinhala-Buddhist nation-state can be seen in real-time social media conversations.
But beyond that, I want to stress something important. The attack on Muslim culture through AI-generated content is increasing at an alarming rate. The inability of Muslims to counter-generate content or confront this problem politically has put them in a position of real disadvantage.
To start with, what stops Buddhists from seeing content ridiculing their culture/religion is not any inherent superiority (far from it), but rather the fear of retribution and state persecution. Put bluntly, no one except Buddhists believes in the superiority of Buddhism or Buddhist culture—no one has to (the same goes for other religions). But the problem is that one group (Sinhala-Buddhists and Sinhala Christian Zionists) has the freedom, without consequence, to antagonize another group, while the other has to defend itself but cannot antagonize in return. This is the unequal relation of power between the Sinhalese (sovereign) and minorities (non-sovereign). One cannot resolve this by singing the national anthem before ifthar.
Then, Muslim women’s bodies are more regulated by the Sinhala-Buddhist state under the Sinhala male gaze. What does that mean? Most of these conversations about Muslim nursing attire are led by Sinhala men who want to impose their version of what a nursing uniform ought to be, informed by their cultural values, on Muslim women. I have said it before and will say it again: the enemy of Muslim women is not the Muslim man. The enemy is the Sinhala men and women. To scapegoat Muslim patriarchy for Sinhala patriarchal frustration is something that should be resisted. Muslim women’s struggle, or lack thereof, against Muslim patriarchy is not a Sinhala problem either. Muslim men will defend Muslim women regardless of the reasons.
Finally, it does not matter what dress code female nurses in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and other Muslim countries wear. Florence Nightingale’s attire is irrelevant to this conversation. What is relevant and important is that Muslim female nurses require a certain uniform, and they have the right to it. You do not have to respect it or like it because the rights of Muslims are not dependent on your personal preference. The mandatory cremation policy and dress-code issues are both a result of Muslims not having sovereign status in Sri Lanka. Why Sinhalese can ridicule Islam but Muslims cannot insult Buddhism is a sovereignty issue, not an ethical question. So, instead of explaining to people who act on the power bestowed upon them by the state about the principles and benevolence of Islam, try to politically organize and resist. After all, you can sing the national anthem as loudly as you want, but unless you are a sovereign subject, you are under Sinhala-Buddhist social domination.”
