This Perspective was published in the World Socialist Website Site on 06 October 2025.
Today marks two years since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, one of the greatest crimes of the modern era. Before the eyes of the entire world, the Israeli government—armed, financed and defended by every imperialist power—has carried out a campaign of mass murder, ethnic cleansing and deliberate starvation. At least 67,000 Palestinians have been killed, including 20,000 children, and the entire population has been repeatedly displaced.
Displaced Palestinians fleeing northern Gaza carry their belongings along the coastal road toward southern Gaza, Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2025, after the Israeli army issued evacuation orders from Gaza City. [AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi]
In order to launch this long planned genocide, Israel used as its pretext the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, in which a few thousand fighters with small arms, possessing no armored vehicles or aircraft, breached the Israeli border without resistance. To claim that Israel, with one of the most sophisticated intelligence networks in the world, was taken completely by surprise by a few thousand Hamas fighters is a despicable fiction.
As the events of the past two years have shown—in Israel’s assassinations of foreign leaders, military officers and scientists—Israeli intelligence has penetrated every state and movement in the region. Indeed, within months of the October 7 attacks, newspaper accounts revealed that Israel possessed the entire Hamas battle plan but orchestrated a deliberate stand-down of its troops stationed on the border.
The genocide that followed was the premeditated outcome of 75 years of brutal oppression, the implementation of the “final solution” to the Palestinian “problem.” It has exposed before the entire world the bankrupt and reactionary character of Zionism. The Israeli state has shown itself to be a murderous instrument of imperialism.
While carried out by Israel, the genocide has been a joint operation of world imperialism. Every imperialist government, from Washington to London, Paris and Berlin, together with the entire media, justified the Israeli assault on Gaza. A hideous double standard was adopted, in which any act of mass murder by Israel, which illegally occupies Gaza, was justified, while any effort at resistance by the Palestinians was demonized as “terrorism.”
Opposition to the Israeli state was slandered as “antisemitism,” in an exercise that the WSWS referred to as “semantic inversion,” in which “a word is utilized in a manner and within a context that is the exact opposite of its real and long-accepted meaning.” This became the framework for a brutal and escalating assault on democratic rights, in which opposition to genocide has been criminalized. The attempt to equate opposition to the genocide with hatred of the Jews, is, in any case, negated by the prominent role played by Jewish people around the world in mass demonstrations.
The United States has been Israel’s key weapons supplier, funneling unlimited amounts of deadly military gear to fuel the slaughter. But Germany, France, Britain and others have all contributed their share to the bloodbath. Moreover, they have all purchased billions in Israeli government bonds to help finance the murderous military machine they also armed.
Underscoring the fact that these crimes have been facilitated by the major North American and European powers, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was allowed to defend his actions from the podium of the United Nations last month, even though an arrest warrant against him for war crimes is outstanding.
The imperialists back the genocide as a central component of their drive to secure control over the oil-rich Middle East, part of a global eruption of imperialist war targeting Russia and China. Their support for the genocide has demonstrated that they are ready to deploy any and all means to secure for themselves access to markets, raw materials, labour and geostrategic influence.
This imperialist plunder has culminated in Trump’s “peace” plan, which proposes robbing Palestinians of all their rights by creating a neo-colonial protectorate under the control of America’s would-be Führer and his bagman, the unindicted war criminal Tony Blair. If Hamas follows Trump’s demand to accept this arrangement, the Palestinians will be expelled to make way for a US-controlled trade corridor through the Middle East. If they refuse, Israel will get the green light to slaughter the remaining Palestinians en masse.
A particularly foul role in this process has been played by the bourgeois nationalist regimes of the Middle East. The entire history of the 20th century has shown the incapacity of any form of nationalism to secure the democratic and social rights of the working class. The despicable role of these governments culminated in their embrace of the “peace” plan promoted by Trump, which completely repudiates the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.
The genocide in Gaza has provoked mass revulsion and opposition throughout the world. Over the past two years, tens of millions have participated in demonstrations spanning every continent, from Europe and the Americas to the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Trump’s plan to turn the Middle East into a US fiefdom on the bones of the Palestinians, and Israel’s violent seizure of the Sumud aid flotilla, have ignited a new and broader wave of protest.
In recent days, millions have filled the streets of Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Colombia and Argentina. In Italy, action initiated by dockworkers, who refused to load weapons for Israel, triggered a one-day general strike of more than 2 million workers and a million-strong march in Rome. Though still limited by the trade union bureaucracies and appeals to the Meloni government, these actions point to the immense potential power of the international working class to halt the genocide.
One day of coordinated strike action has shaken Trump’s closest European ally. An organized, global industrial and political movement of the working class could stop the imperialist war machine in its tracks. Nothing less than a mass, international movement of workers can end the genocide and block the extension of American imperialism’s drive for domination—from Gaza to a wider war aimed at Iran, Russia and ultimately China.
The development of opposition to the genocide must be guided by an understanding of the political lessons of the past two years. The central lesson is the total bankruptcy of all appeals to governments of the imperialist powers. They are not the instruments for halting genocide but its perpetrators and enablers.
The perspective of a two-state solution has failed. Only the unification of all the peoples of the Middle East can lead to a viable future. The Israeli state has proven to be a historical monstrosity, resulting in demoralization and degradation. The Israeli working class must repudiate the poisonous ideology and politics of Zionism, reject the reactionary dystopia of the “Jewish state” and strive for the unity of Israeli and Palestinian workers in the struggle for the United Socialist Federation of the Middle East.
In a lecture delivered on October 24, 2023, three weeks after the beginning of the genocide, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North explained:
In the final analysis, the liberation of the Palestinian people can be achieved only through a unified struggle of the working class, Arab and Jewish, against the Zionist regime, as well as the treacherous Arab and Iranian capitalist regimes, and their replacement with a union of socialist republics throughout the Middle East and, indeed, the entire world.
This is a gigantic task. But it is the only perspective that is based on a correct appraisal of the present stage of world history, the contradictions and crisis of world capitalism and the dynamic of the international class struggle. The wars in Gaza and Ukraine are tragic demonstrations of the catastrophic role and consequences of national programs in a historical epoch whose essential and defining characteristics are the primacy of world economy, the globally integrated character of the productive forces of capitalism, and, therefore, the necessity to base the struggle of the working class on an international strategy.
Two years later, there are growing signs of a global resurgence of working class struggle. The Trump administration’s drive to establish a presidential dictatorship is bringing it into head-on conflict with the working class in the United States, despite all efforts by the Democrats to sow complacency and passivity. President Macron in France is unable to form a stable government, amid mass opposition to his demands for austerity to pay for remilitarisation. Starmer in the UK and Merz in Germany have no popular support whatsoever.
Internationally, there has been an explosion of popular anti-government struggles, led by “Generation Z”—in Kenya, Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, Morocco and Madagascar.
The development of this opposition along revolutionary lines requires that workers break free from the control of the social democratic, Stalinist and trade union bureaucracies, along with their pseudo-left defenders, who work to contain and dissipate opposition. This requires building new, democratic organizations of class struggle—rank-and-file committees in every workplace and neighborhood—to coordinate and lead a unified international offensive of the working class.
Workers, students, youth and all opponents of Zionism and imperialism must fight for:
An immediate halt to all weapons shipments to Israel;
A comprehensive boycott of all trade and other economic activity with Israel;
The prosecution of all US, European and other corporations assisting Israel in carrying out the genocide.
The arrest of Israeli officials for war crimes;
An end to state repression of anti-genocide protesters and the repeal of all anti-demonstration laws;
Immediate, unhindered delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza by all available routes.
These demands must spearhead the broader movement already developing in the working class internationally. The same governments that funnel weapons of death to Israel are erecting dictatorial forms of rule at home to suppress opposition to oligarchic rule, mass impoverishment and the drive to world war.
The genocide in Gaza has laid bare the historical dead end of the capitalist system itself. The “normalization” of genocide is the product of a system that has exhausted any progressive role. It is accompanied by the normalization of fascism, the normalization of military-police dictatorship, the normalization of world war and oligarchic rule.
The perspective that must guide the working class is Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution. The democratic and social aspirations of the oppressed can be achieved only through the independent political mobilization of the working class, on a world scale, for the conquest of power.
The critical task is the building of a new revolutionary leadership to guide this struggle. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and its sections, the Socialist Equality Parties, fight to unite workers and youth across all borders in a single movement against capitalism, for the establishment of workers’ governments and the socialist reorganization of the world economy to meet human need, not private profit.
This statement was published originally in the World Socialist Web Site on the 19 September 2025.
In the week since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Trump administration has escalated its conspiracy to establish a presidential dictatorship.
The policy of the Trump regime was spelled out clearly by fascist strategist Stephen Bannon, one of Trump’s closest political allies. “If we are going to go to war,” he declared, “let’s go to war.” The Trump administration is waging a war—against the population, against democratic rights, against Constitutional government.
President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, Sept. 19, 2025, in Washington. [AP Photo/Alex Brandon]
This war is being conducted within the framework of the public deification of Kirk. Over the past week, the White House has spearheaded a campaign to ban all criticism of the Trump administration. Workers, including teachers, airline staff and others, have been fired for critical social media posts about Kirk.
On Wednesday, ABC/Disney announced that it was suspending Jimmy Kimmel Live!, after Kimmel made mild, accurate remarks on Monday about the political exploitation of Kirk’s killing. The move followed an explicit directive from the White House and its enforcers. FCC (Federal Communications Commission) Chair Brendan Carr threatened broadcasters, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Nexstar and Disney, desperate to protect multibillion-dollar mergers and profits, rushed to comply.
In interviews Thursday, Carr declared that Kimmel’s suspension was not the “last shoe to drop,” calling for a “massive shift that’s taking place in the media ecosystem.” On the same day, Trump himself declared that regulators should revoke the licenses of broadcasters who air “negative coverage” of him.
The critical question now is: What must be done to stop this drive to dictatorship? In answering this question, it is necessary to identify the political context of Trump’s attempt to overthrow the Constitution, the class and economic interests that underlie the actions of the government, the social force that has the power to defend democratic rights, and the political strategy and program upon which the fight against Trump must be based.
First, it is necessary to put aside all self-deluding hopes that what is unfolding is anything less than a drive to establish a presidential dictatorship, based on the military, police, paramilitary forces and fascist gangs. The essential purpose of the glorification of Charlie Kirk has been to provide a martyr symbol to galvanize the most reactionary forces in the country.
As the World Socialist Web Site has warned, the Hitler admirers in Trump’s inner circle, such as Vice President JD Vance and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, are working off the playbook written by the Nazis. Kirk is the Trump regime’s “Horst Wessel” (the name of a murdered storm trooper) and the assassination is their equivalent to the infamous Reichstag Fire, the burning of the German parliament building, which was seized upon by Hitler to claim absolute power in March 1933.
The cancellation of the Jimmy Kimmel show is yet another action based on the tactics of the Nazi regime. Any form of speech, including jokes, that was deemed insulting to the honor and dignity of Hitler was treated as a criminal offense that merited drastic punishment. The “Heil Hitler” salute became an obligatory form of greeting, even between friends.
Second, Trump is not acting on his own. However grotesque his individual qualities, he represents the interests of the corporate and financial oligarchy. Here again, the parallels to Nazi Germany are chilling. It is a historical fact that Hitler’s rise to power would not have been possible without the resources provided to the Nazi movement by leading German capitalists. Once in office, Hitler’s brutal regime served the interests of German banks and corporations, and they supported his dictatorship.
If anything, the alliance of Trump and today’s financial-corporate oligarchy is even more intense than that which prevailed in Nazi Germany. It can be described, without exaggeration, as a love affair. In the midst of Trump’s assault on democratic rights, he was feted last week at a White House dinner, where a gang of mega-millionaires and billionaires sang his praises. An even more obscene spectacle was staged this week at Windsor Castle in Britain. Seated next to King Charles III, Trump was feted at a state banquet by a retinue of oligarchs, including Tim Cook of Apple, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Ruth Porat of Alphabet, financiers Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone, Jane Fraser of Citigroup, Larry Fink of BlackRock and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America.
Third, underlying the public reverence for Trump are cold-blooded economic and political calculations. The staggering concentration of wealth in an infinitesimal segment of the population is not compatible with democratic forms of rule. The rich are convinced that the defense of their wealth and their unrestricted exploitation of the working class is incompatible with democracy. Dictatorship is their preferred form of political rule.
However, the oligarchy’s reasons for supporting the overthrow of whatever remains of American democracy extend beyond their uncontainable lust for ever greater heaps of money and personal wealth. The American ruling class is acutely conscious of and terrified by the existential crisis of the capitalist system. It is aware that the national debt—now approaching $40 trillion—is unsustainable.
The oligarchs are convinced that a massive assault on the living standards and even the lives of the working class is necessary. All the social reforms extending back to the Progressive era of the first two decades of the 20th century, the New Deal of the 1930s, and the Great Society of the 1960s must be ended. Critical programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are to be all but eliminated. The war on medicine—to the point of ending vaccinations against COVID, measles, mumps, polio, whooping cough, and other deadly illnesses—is aimed at substantially raising infant and child mortality and lowering life expectancy.
The wiping out of regulations that provided any sort of protection against injury and death in factories, mines, depots, shipyards, and other workplaces is a major objective.
Yet another factor in the political calculations of the capitalist elites is the geo-political crisis confronting American imperialism. The protracted deterioration in the global economic and strategic position of the United States has reached critical dimensions. The rise of China and the development of an alliance of states challenging American hegemony cannot be stopped except through war. The militarization of the United States demands ever greater expenditures, which, in turn, intensifies the pressure to slash social expenditures and wages. Moreover, the preparation and launching of wars requires the violent suppression of domestic political opposition.
These are the objective factors that underlie the collapse of American democracy. Trump’s policies are those of the ruling class. This is not to ignore the specific pathological features of his personality and that of his MAGA cabal that impart to this regime its particularly degenerate character. But even if the workings of actuarial statistics were to suddenly remove Trump from the scene, it would not halt the drive to dictatorship. The war on democracy and the working class would continue.
This objective cause of the breakdown of democracy is verified by the fact that parallel processes are being manifested in all major capitalist countries. Throughout Europe neo-fascist parties are gaining strength. The drive toward dictatorship is a global phenomenon.
Fourth, the correct identification of the source of Trump’s war against the working class leads to critical political conclusions. The starting point of any serious struggle against dictatorship is a break with the Democratic Party. To rely on the Democratic Party to oppose Trump is to guarantee defeat.
The Democrats are, like the Republicans, a party of Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the corporate-financial oligarchy. What they fear above all is not the rise of fascism but the eruption of a mass movement from below that threatens the foundations of capitalist rule. This accounts for the Democratic Party’s cowardly capitulation to the fascist glorification of Kirk and its feckless response to the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and all the previous dictatorial decrees issued by Trump.
The prostration of the Democratic Party was exposed when the US Senate unanimously approved a resolution marking October 14, Kirk’s birthday, as a “National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk.” Not one Democrat, including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, had the courage to object. It would have been sufficient, and politically correct, to oppose the assassination on principled grounds, i.e., that the killing of one or another despicable figure serves absolutely no progressive interest, that it sows confusion among workers and youth and that it plays into the hands of the reactionaries.
But to sanction the elevation of Kirk—a man whose record of racism, antisemitism, opposition to civil rights, and promotion of authoritarian violence is well documented—as a national hero is obscene. Yet Sanders and the Democrats joined in this sanctification.
The next day, 90 Democrats, including the party’s leadership, voted with Republicans in the House to pass a resolution “honoring the life and legacy of Charles Kirk,” praising the fascist provocateur as a martyr for “freedom” and “civil discourse,” and a “fierce defender” of “life, liberty, limited government, and individual responsibility.”
Fifth, the development of the struggle to defeat Trump must be based on the mobilization of the multimillioned working class—the social force that has the power, if mobilized on the basis of a correct political strategy, to defeat Trump and drive him from office.
The key elements of this strategy are:
1) The complete political and organizational independence of the working class from the Democratic Party and its collaborators and apologists, i.e., the DSA, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the myriad middle class organizations and individuals who believe that shouting obscenities on various social media platforms will stop Trump. These are the methods of frustrated liberals who hope that their hysterical rhetoric will move the Democratic Party to fight Trump.
2) The building of a new form of organization that can unify the working class and mobilize its vast industrial and economic power against the Trump regime. This new form of organization proposed by the Socialist Equality Party consists of rank-and-file committees. They must be established in every factory, workplace, school and neighborhood to organize resistance to Trump’s dictatorship. These committees must become centers of resistance, uniting all sections of the working class (in industry, logistics, transport, restaurants and fast food, social services, legal defense, education, arts and culture, entertainment, medicine, health care, sciences, computer technology, programming and other highly specialized professions) and student youth against Trump’s fascist government, the complicity of the Democrats, and the broader assault on democratic rights and living standards.
The building of rank-and-file committees is essential to break the stranglehold of the trade union bureaucracies, which function as industrial police for the corporations and utilize their power to block every form of resistance by the working class. Power must be transferred from the offices of the bureaucratic parasites to the workers on the shop floor and job sites, where decisions on all matters of strategy, policy and action can be made democratically by the working class.
These rank-and-file committees, spreading across all workplaces, will create new centers of coordinated social power upon which the defense of democracy throughout the country can be based. The mobilized working class will be able to inspire with confidence and unify all the now disparate elements of protest in a massive social movement against the hated government led and controlled by capitalist oligarchy.
3) This movement, led by the working class, requires a program that accurately reflects socio-economic realities and corresponds to the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population. The capitalist oligarchy has declared war on the working class. The necessary response is the declaration of war by the working class on capitalism, which must result in the socialist reorganization of society. This entails the establishment of public ownership and democratic control by the working class of major industries, banks, utilities and natural resources. Moreover, the obscene levels of wealth concentrated in the approximately 900 billionaires must be expropriated. The 400 richest Americans alone hold a combined wealth of $6.6 trillion, which represents a growth by more than $1 trillion over the previous year. The concentration of so much money and power is a social malignancy that kills democracy.
4) The most important element of this strategy—upon which the implementation and realization of all previous elements depends—is internationalism. No effective struggle can be waged by workers in the United States unless their actions are coordinated and aligned with the struggles of the global working class. The threat of fascism is an international phenomenon. The capitalist ruling class of every country has its own version of Trump and even Hitler. American workers must repudiate the reactionary, outdated and self-defeating ideology of nationalism, which is the primal evil that instigates the racism and ethnic hatreds utilized by fascism. It is not an accidental coincidence that Trump launched his drive for dictatorship by unleashing a savage assault on immigrants. The deprivation of their democratic rights was only the first stage in the overthrow of the Constitution. The masked ICE agents who prowl through cities are the vanguard of the fascist paramilitary that Trump is planning to unleash against all sections of the working class.
An inseparable corollary of the fight for the international unity of American workers with their class brothers and sisters beyond the borders of the United States is irreconcilable opposition to US imperialism, militarism and war. The Gaza genocide carried out by the Zionist regime, which has to a great extent been carried out with weapons provided by the United States, reveals the barbarism of which capitalism is capable. The mass murder of Palestinians sanctioned by all the imperialist powers is an anticipation of what the capitalist oligarchs are prepared to inflict against the workers in their “own” countries.
It flows from this internationalist strategy that the rights of immigrants must be defended against the criminal and inhumane policy of deportation. The principle of birthright citizenship, inscribed in the Constitution, must be defended without compromise. Further, the class-conscious worker rejects the insidious and cruel distinction between the “native” and “foreign born.” Moreover, sanctions and tariffs imposed by the Trump administration must be opposed. The working class cannot defend its jobs and interests by supporting economic nationalism, which is entirely reactionary in an era of the global integration of production. The working class can advance its interests only by demanding the tearing down of national boundaries, which not only strangle the development of the productive forces but also lead mankind down the terrible path to nuclear world war.
Even before Trump began his second term and launched his drive for dictatorship, the Socialist Equality Party issued a call for the formation of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). This initiative has not only been vindicated. Its development has acquired burning urgency.
5) The strategy, organization and action that are necessary to defeat Trump, defend democratic rights, and prevent fascism and war will not emerge spontaneously. This program must be fought for. But the determination that is required to take up and wage this fight is incompatible with pessimism and demoralization. These moods lead to paralysis. Moreover, pessimism is invariably connected to a superficial and false appraisal of reality. The Democrats, the unions and the media cultivate the myth of an all-powerful government while insisting that nothing can be done. This is a lie. What is lacking is not mass opposition but, rather, a political strategy to guide and organize the struggle against Trump’s assault on democratic rights.
The Socialist Equality Party advances this program as the basis for the struggle against Trump and the degenerate oligarchy which he represents. Our program is not for the pessimists, the skeptics and the demoralized, but for the fighters among workers, students, youth, professionals, artists and intellectuals. There is no time to lose.
We call on all workers and young people who agree with this perspective to join the Socialist Equality Party, mobilize the power of the working class, defeat the conspiracy of the oligarchs and fight for a socialist future without fascism, genocide and war
Reposted below is the article of the World Socialist Web Site published on 07 September 2025.
In the wake of a huge police crackdown and thousands of arrests, the protest movement that erupted in Indonesia late last month has largely subsided, but none of the basic issues that fuelled the widespread demonstrations have been resolved.
The immediate trigger for the protests was the decision to pay a huge monthly accommodation allowance of 50 million rupiah ($US3,045) to the 580 parliamentarians of the House of Representatives (DPR)—10 to 20 times the minimum wage paid to millions of workers struggling to survive.
The lavish allowance was emblematic of far deeper concerns and opposition stemming from the immense social gulf between the country’s wealthy few and their political representatives and the vast majority of working people. Moreover, the social crisis facing broad layers of the population, particularly young people, is only worsening as economic growth slows and unemployment rises. The jobless rate for youth has hit 16 percent, forcing many into poorly paid, casual work.
Protesters clash with the police during a protest against lavish allowances given to parliament members, in Jakarta, August 28, 2025. [AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana]
The protests dramatically escalated after the callous killing of a young ride-share motorbike rider Affan Kurniawan on August 28. He was run over by an armoured police vehicle amid a mass mobilisation of police, including the notorious, heavily-armed BRIMOB. In the following days, angry protesters clashed with police, attacked government buildings and stormed the homes of prominent political figures including Finance Minister Sri Mulyani, the architect of the budget cuts that set off protests earlier in the year.
Facing a deepening political crisis, President Prabowo Subianto delayed a planned trip to China. He appeared at a press conference on August 31, flanked by leaders of the main political parties, to appeal for calm, declaring he understood “the genuine aspirations of the public.” At the same time, however, he ordered “the police and military to take the strongest possible action” against purported looting and destruction.
The protests involving thousands were not limited to the capital Jakarta but had spread to major cities throughout the country, including Surabaya, Surakarta, Bandung, Semarang and Yogakarta in Java; Banda Aceh, Padang and Medan in Sumatra; as well as Makassar and Kendari in Sulawesi, Palangka Raya in Kalimantan, and Manokwari in West Papua.
At least 11 people died in the clashes with the police and military, hundreds were injured, and another 20 protesters are missing, according to the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence. More than 3,000 people have been arrested.
Confronting a police crackdown, the protests subsided last week but the anger has not. Smaller protests continued. Last Wednesday, hundreds of women from the Indonesian Women’s Alliance (IWA) marched to the parliament building in Jakarta wielding brooms to “sweep away the dirt of the state, militarism and police repression.”
Last Thursday, a student demonstration led by the All-Indonesian Students’ Union (BEM SI) took place outside the parliament, where its central coordinator Muzammil Ihsan read out a list of demands, including the reduction of parliamentary allowances, complete reform of the national police and parliament, the release of all those arrested and the creation of 19 million jobs.
On the same day, members of the Labor Movement with the People (GEBRAK) held a protest in a major road in Jakarta also demanding the complete reform of the police and parliament.
On Thursday evening, a delegation of student leaders was invited to meet ministers at the Presidential Palace but reportedly walked out of the talks after being told they had to consider “the nation’s development” in making any demands.
Last week, a grouping of activist organisations drew up a list of 17 short-term “people’s demands” to be implemented by Prabowo and the government by last Friday along with eight longer-term ones. The deadline, however, passed with few of the demands being met or partially met.
In a bid to quell widespread anger, the parliament did announce the axing of the housing allowance that initially sparked the protests. The announcement was left to the parliamentary speaker Puan Maharani. She is the daughter of former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, chairperson of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P)—the only parliamentary party that is not part of the Prabowo government.
On the same day, Co-ordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Airlangga Hartarto suggested that the government would carry out various stimulus measures to boost jobs and incomes—including wage subsidies for those earning less than 10 million rupiah a month, a program of public works, tax exemptions and steps to prevent mass lay-offs. But under conditions of a slowing economy that will be further hit by Trump’s tariffs, these proposals have the character of empty promises.
No steps have been taken to rein in the police and military. The only action taken against the police has been against low-level officers involved in the widely publicised killing of ride-share worker Affan Kurniawan. The officer in charge of the vehicle that struck Kurniawan has been dishonourably dismissed, and another received a seven-year demotion.
These measures are unlikely to assuage popular anger and resentment. Imran, a food delivery driver, told Al Jazeera that “inequality” was the root cause of the mass protests, “including economic inequality, educational inequality, health inequality and unequal public services.”
Referring to the government and parliament, he said: “They are not concerned about our fate. They should be present to resolve the problems facing the community, not fan the flames. These protests arose from the community’s poor economic conditions.”
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Rahmawati, a housewife, said that public anger had “finally exploded …because we feel like no one cares about us… What we want is for them [politicians] to care about us and our needs. Every year, the price of basic foodstuffs rises and never goes back down again. Groceries are becoming more and more difficult to afford.”
Significantly, the protests in Indonesia reverberated more broadly throughout South East Asia as workers and young people confront very similar economic and social problems, exacerbated by slowing economies. Protests took place last week in support of those in Indonesia, including in Malaysia and Thailand.
Thai students hung a banner on an overpass near Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok declaring “Thailand stands with the people of Indonesia” and called for justice for those protesters killed during police crackdowns.
In Thailand, a social media poster called Yammi shared instructions on how to order meals for Jakarta-based ride-share and food delivery motorbike riders. Revealing sympathy not just with the protesters but the difficult and dangerous conditions facing poorly paid riders, the post went viral in the region and internationally. Donations came in from Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei, as well as Japan, Sweden and the United States.
The protests have provided a glimpse of the explosive social tensions that have built up in Indonesia as well as the broader region and will only intensify amid growing global economic turmoil.
Katuwana Massacre Victims – From right: Sisiliyana, Edwin, Nilmini, Mathangalatha, Sujithaseeli, Chandraleka and Niranjala. Chulananda, first from the Left, was assassinated in 1990.
On August 27, at Katuwana, in Hambantota District, the relatives of the seven family members, who were massacred by Sri Lanka Army in August 1989, held an event of commemoration of their loved-ones, at the same location where they were bombed. This was the first time a commemoration event was held in remembrance of these victims of state terror after 36 years of impunity and oppression. theSocialist.lk reporters were present at the occasion.
On that fateful night, three and half a decade plus one year ago, Sri Lanka army of the Singha Regiment – 6th Battalion invaded the house of the family, where the only male who was at home at the time was the 63 year old father, J.H.A. Edwin, a Sinhalaese traditional medical physician. The others were the 53-year-old mother, H.A. Sisiliyana; the three young daughters, namely J.H.A. Nilmini Asoka (25), J.H.A. Mathangalatha (20), J.H.A. Sujithaseeli (15); a niece, W.A. Chandraleka (24), and the 6 year old granddaughter, N.A. Niranjala Wilson. All were ethnic Sinhalese. The army killed them all on the spot or, according to some witnesses—who were also killed later—the four young girls were carried to the army camp, raped for three days and killed. The house was bombed and the family was burnt with the house.
The relatives displayed the pictures of their loved ones and lit candles. Two surviving daughters, their husbands, grandchildren and their families and friends observed minutes of silence. Even decades later, their tears have not dried. Vimukthi, a grandson of Edwin addressed the gathering. He stated as follows:
“This is the first time in 36 years that we have been able to gather here publicly to speak their names…They were silenced by guns and disappeared into the shadows of mass graves and tire pyres.
For 36 long years, we could not hold this historic event in commemoration of their memory. We could not come here, speak their names, and mourn openly. The state of terror, the climate of repression, and the continued threat against those who sought truth and justice kept families like ours silent. But silence is not forgetfulness. These years have only deepened our grief and strengthened our determination.
Today we break that silence… Those who carried them out—from the military, death squads and the police to those who directed them—must be held accountable before history, if not yet before law.
Our relatives’ blood cries out not for revenge, but for truth and justice. It cries out for recognition that these lives mattered, that the poor, the villagers, the youth killed in those years were not expendable.
We carry your names and the memories of cruelties inflicted on you forward as a profound mark of protest, so that such crimes must never be repeated.
May your memory give courage to all who fight for truth, justice and dignity and against State repression.”
He also read out the name of J.H.A. Chulananda (22), the only son of Edwin and Sisiliyana, whom he stated was “a young man who aspired to justice and social equality but was misled by the reactionary political forces of the era”, and who was killed by Beliatta Police in October 1990. He was said to be a member of fascist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) during the 1988-1990 insurgency. When the Army failed to capture or kill him, evidently, the massacre of his entire family was orchestrated as an act of reprisal and terrorization.
Family members of the Katuwana Massacre victims commemorate their loved ones, marking 36 years of impunity.
Testimonials
We talked to the victims’ relatives. Edwin’s eldest surviving daughter Chandani (63) related to us her harrowing story of years of pain, endurance and struggle:
“People called my father Weda Mahattaya. He was very much loved by people. He was a very innocent, kind and honest man. He walked slowly, smiled pleasantly, spoke gently, and wore a sarong and the national dress. Formerly, as a monk, he had published a number of Ayurvedic books. Many people who received medicinal treatment from him have met me and told me about the compassionate, and often free, treatment they received from my father and mother.
Our family is a large one of six daughters, and my brother, Chulananda, was the only son. Our family’s economy was founded on meager but stable earnings from my father’s Ayurvedic practice. We had paddy land and acres of coconut, cinnamon and citronella land, which my father cultivated and managed. Due to litigations on land disputes, which my father all won, he lost financially, and his businesses collapsed. We all lived in a thatched house, made of wattle and mud. However, my father could still afford to feed all of us well, educate us, and also help the needy.
By 1971, my father was a strong supporter of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and Sirimavo Bandaranaike. However, by 1977, he was fed-up with and dissatisfied with the United Front government and voted for the United National Party, whose leader J.R.Jayawardene promised a “Dharmista Samajaya” [A society led by noble principles].
We all went to Katuwana Maha Vidyalaya (school). My brother did not continue his education after grade seven. He was very kind-hearted, sociable, and very helpful to the villagers. He cared for his friends and neighbors more than his own family. He often stayed away from home longer than he stayed at home. He was outstanding, intelligent, fair-looking and, naturally, the youth considered him as their leader. He wanted to do a job, but also never wanted to leave the village. I think he had made connections with the JVP since late 1987.
My brother had earned the wrath of village thugs and father’s former opponents. Once they even attempted to take his life by stabbing him. He narrowly escaped with his life, but his friend succumbed to the injuries.
In 1979, I married a teacher and lived separately. One of my older sisters married a police officer and went to live in Welimada in early 1989. All other sisters were with my parents at home, Loku (Sujithaseeli), the next to youngest preparing for her Ordinary Level Examinations. Hichchi (Mathangalatha) was studying for the Advanced Level (A/L) examination. Neela (Nilmini) was attending vocational training courses after A/L in expectation of a job.
During the school vacation in August 1989, my two elder sisters [Nilmini and Mathangalatha] came to visit us at our residence at Walasmulla [17 km from Katuwana] by bus. Our parental home was just about half a kilometer away from the Army camp located in the Katuwana Govi Jana Seva [Aggrarian Services Center] premises. While my sisters were passing the army camp, some soldiers had shouted and remarked, “well, go, have a round and come”. That was on 26th August, a Saturday.
My sisters had lunch with us. That was our last meal together. All my three children were much fond of staying with their grandparents and aunts. So, all three were crying and pleading to go with their aunts. Finally, my daughter, Niranjala went with them.
On the morning of August 29th, my husband went to Katuwana with a friend to bring our daughter back home, as school vacation was ending. My husband saw the bombed house; he saw burning human flesh and a skull. Nobody was alive, including my child.
After the incident, I went to lodge a complaint at Walsamulla Police, as there was no police station in Katuwana at the time. The police refused to record my complaint. The Officer in Charge (OIC), K.M. Premathilake put his pistol to my mouth and shouted, ‘You woman, keep your mouth shut. Those who take arms will perish by arms.’
Exactly on my 28th birthday, on October 22, 1990, my husband received information from one Silva that my brother had been killed by Beliatta Police. Dasanayake, OIC of the Beliatta Police, who had shot my brother, had quickly informed K. Danapala, the newly elected Provincial Councillor (PC), about the killing. Danapala [who expired a few years ago] feared my brother would pose a threat to his life, which was never the case. My brother’s body had been burnt on a tyre-pyre, after the body was shown to the satisfaction of Danapala.
Danapala too had had a land dispute with my father a long time ago. He lost a court case he had filed against my father. There was also a caste difference between Danapala and us. My father, and almost that entire block of the village, belonged to a higher caste than Danapala’s. Katuwana had a number of such blocks of houses called “Mandi”, where people of different castes lived.”
Chandani’s husband, Chamal (69), related his traumatic experiences as follows:
”On the morning of 29 August, I went with a friend of mine in his car to Katuwana to bring my daughter back home. My friend wanted to meet Danapala Manthree (PC) and request his help to get his nephew released from Walasmulla Army camp. At the road barrier at the Katuwana Army Camp, the army stopped our car. My friend told them we were going to meet Manthree Thuma (Danapala). So, we were allowed to proceed.
When we reached the place where the house was situated, I could not see the house. I could only see the smoke. I went closer. I could not believe my eyes. The house was demolished and everything was burning. I could see human flesh burning inside the house close to the main door. I saw a skull burning. I could not stand up. One or two villagers came to me and held me tight. A sister of my mother-in -law came to me and said, ‘Nobody is alive. Everybody is burnt’. I shouted, calling my daughter’s name. The aunt told me, ‘You should leave now. If the army comes and finds you, they will kill you too”. My friend then pushed me inside the car and brought me back home. I told my wife everything. She was devastated.
A couple of weeks later, Gamini, one of Danapala’s home guards [Grama Arakshaka – members of government’s Civil Security Force], told me that he and another guard were present with the army when they committed the crime, and asked me not to search for the family as everybody was killed by the army. He told me that the four sisters were taken to Katuwana army camp, raped and tortured there for three days, and then killed. It was not long afterwards that I came to know that both those guards were assassinated.
During the same period, we were trying to lodge complaints at police stations and even searched for them at army camps, as we believed they were still alive in some detention center. When my wife and I went to lodge a complaint at Walasmulla Police, we were chased away. I even dared to go to Walasmulla army camp to meet Captain P.L.U. Buddadhasa of the 6th Battalion, Singha Regiment, to find out some information about my relatives. He just told me, ‘Do not search for them. They are all dead. Do some religious observances for them’. When I went to complain to the ASP [Assistant Superintendent of Police] office at Tangalle, ASP Ekanayake warned me, saying, ‘You are a teacher; do not try to search for them. Otherwise, you will lose your own life.’
I was able to lodge a complaint at Middeniya Police only in late September 1994, after Madam Chandrika Kumaratunga was elected President. We were also able to complain to the Presidential Commission on Disappearances. The Muttetuwegama Commission’s final report contains the seven names of our relatives.
However, the court case never proceeded after 1998. We have learned that the Police had colluded with Danapala to systematically bury the case, four years after the collection of samples from the massacre site.
Due to the lasting psychological shock my wife and I had to endure, I could not continue my work as a teacher with sincerity. Therefore, I decided to retire under the Circular No.44/90. Thereafter, the conditions of our family worsened. I had to struggle for sustenance for my family of four children.
Chandrika soon resumed the war with the LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam]. By 1998, we learned of the crimes committed by the Sri Lankan army against innocent Tamil people in Jaffna. The case of Krishanti Kumaraswamy and her family’s murder at Chemmani shook our souls. Then we realized the extent of the crimes Tamils must have been forced to suffer in the North, sometimes even beyond the crimes committed against our family. Later, Mahinda Rajapaksa continued the war, and his and all succeeding governments praised the mercenaries as ‘Rana Viruvo’ [war heroes]. Throughout, we were silenced.”
He also told us about his experience with the false “human rights” crusaders of the time:
“The orphaned youngest sister of my wife was studying and living with us during that period. Once, in early 1997, I went with her to meet Mahinda Rajapaksa at his Carlton office, seeking his help to find a job for her. My parents had worked for D.A. Rajapaksa and I myself had, as a youth, campaigned for Mahinda’s elections. So, I knew him personally. After waiting a long time to meet him, we forcibly entered his room and informed him of our predicament after the massacre of the family. He shouted at us: ‘Look, these people have worked for the JVP and got themselves killed, and now have come seeking my help to get jobs’. My sister-in-law was crying. She never received a job from him, nor any assistance.”
The other surviving daughter, Indumathi expressed her first hand experience of the wrath the local politician had toward the family:
“Since my father supported the UNP in elections in late 1988 and early 1989, after the general elections, my father went with me to talk to Danapala Manthree. Our parental home was just a few yards away from his residence. He was the uncle of Ananda Kularathna, then UNP cabinet minister from the Mulkirigala seat. We later came to understand that my brother was at that time full time engaged in the activities of the JVP, which had ordered people not to vote at elections [the provincial council election in the Southern Province was held in June 1988]. Danapala seemingly saw his life as threatened by the JVP and its military wing, Deshapremi Janatha Viyaparaya (DJV). However, villagers say my brother never left any room for harm to be inflicted upon anybody in the village, not even on those who envied our family. Danapala ferociously denied any help in finding jobs for me or anyone else in our family. He shouted: ‘There is a terrorist in your house. If it were not for Weda Mahattaya, you and your house would already have been reduced to ashes.’
But, neither my parents nor anybody even dreamt of an impending massacre, because we had not heard of such incidents before.
About two days before the bombing of our home, my elder sister Neela sent me a letter saying that the previous day there had been a bomb blast in the area targeting the army, which had killed several soldiers. My sister wrote that now they felt their lives were also in danger. I think the day she posted that letter was the day she and Hichchi visited my eldest sister at her home in Walasmulla. When she sent that letter, our youngest sister was with me at my house. So, her life was saved.”
Sunitha, the youngest surviving daughter and now a teacher, tearfully recalled her loving parents, her brother, and the harassment by the armed forces:
“My father was a Bodhisattva [a reference to the noble lives of Buddha before enlightenment]. As a skilled physician, sought after by people from different parts of the country, I witnessed how miraculously he saved the lives of many patients who had been brought after snakebites. I also saw how skillfully he cured limb and arm injuries caused by various accidents. My mother was the perfect match for my father. Like a goddess, she was dedicated day and night to treating patients.
Our father had written and published a couple of Veda Grantha [medicinal books]. They were written in verse form. Sarpa Visha Sanharaya I and II [Neutralizing Serpent Venom], Bilindu Roga Sanharaya [Treating Pediatric Illnesses] were very popular, and Manthra Sathakaya [Hundred Mantras] is a book still being sold in bookstores.
He never harmed anybody, not even an insect. I cannot understand how cruel one must be to aim a weapon at such a man of glory and kill him. This world is cursed!
My brother was very handsome. He was always helpful and empathetic toward others. He was a leader to the village youth. Sometimes, village youth even betrayed him, not because of any wrongdoing he committed, but to save themselves when they were arrested for small disputes and fights.
About ten months before the massacre of our family, the chief of the Katuwana Army Camp came to our former house with other soldiers and asked my father to remove all necessary belongings, as they were going to burn our house at 7:00 p.m. that night. My father pleaded with him: “Do not harm us. If my son has done anything wrong, you may punish him.” But they burned our house. The house by the side of Rukmalpitiya Road, where our family was living at the time of the massacre, was built later, about a hundred meters away from the former house on the same road.
I remember, during the period of state terror, the army often intruded into our home and searched everywhere inside. We were always terrorized. They knew very well that my brother was not there, and that only our elderly parents and we girls were present. They questioned us about our brother and even searched for books. Sometimes, they even came in the middle of the night while we were sleeping. Then they would ask us to turn off the lamps (kerosene lamps) and search here and there.”
A systematized killing spree
In both the South and the North, the Sri Lankan ruling elite deployed the full apparatus of the state—the military and police, death squads, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and Emergency Regulations—to eliminate perceived threats to capitalist rule from the political right and, above all, against the innocent rural poor and the oppressed. Theorizing the causes of large scale disappearances during the period, Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) report in December 1997 stated,
“[U]nder the emergency regulations, all restraints on law enforcement officers were removed, and the power to dispose of dead bodies was left to the sole discretion of these officers. Judicial supervision was suspended. There were no provisions even to keep records of the disposed bodies.”
The report further stated as follows:
“Disappearances were the result of a very deliberate policy and were implemented meticulously according to a plan. Law enforcement officers received instructions to arrest, kill and dispose of the bodies. Enacting emergency regulations made this legally possible. The police were constantly coached to carry out killings, and there were methods of supervising how many were to be killed in each area. Incentives were given through the distribution of money for killer squads.
Liquor was also provided to these squads to keep them in a mood conducive to participation in such activities. Lists of those who were to be killed were distributed. Special interrogations were held in special places for interrogation. In many instances, the decision to kill was made during these interrogations, and people were murdered in the secret surroundings of these places. Law enforcement officers mingled with illegal elements in undertaking these activities. Politicians were given direct access to these groups so that they could execute the wishes of these politicians.”
The Commission Report and the Buried Lists
In November 1994, president Kumaratunga appointed three presidential commissions to inquire into incidents of involuntary removals or disappearances of persons after 1 January 1988. The commission chaired by Manouri Muttetuwegama inquired into incidents in Western, Southern and Sabaragamuwa Provinces.
In response to the Commission’s request to provide information on the officers who were attached to the Katuwana Army Camp at the time, on 30 June 1997, the Army replied “not mentioned” in their records—the same answer given in response to most of the other camps. The Commission did not take any further steps to obtain the information from the Army.
The alleged perpetrators of these crimes were shielded by the very recommendations of the Commission itself. While the Commission “found the information and material upon which the allegations of the witnesses were based to be prima facie credible,” it nevertheless stated: “we recommend that the lists of names of persons alleged to have been responsible for involuntary removals or disappearances sent by us under separate cover be not published,” until further investigations were carried out. No such “further investigations” were ever undertaken by Kumaratunga’s government or by successive governments, thereby granting the perpetrators lifelong impunity and protection to commit further crimes. To this day, these confidential lists and the witness testimonies remain undisclosed to the public.
theSocialist.lk has pointed out the class character of the government’s policies of repression during the counterinsurgency in the South, which were later carried forward against the ethnic Tamil population in the North and East, in order to defend the capitalist unitary state and the interests of finance capital.
These atrocities of the capitalist state cannot—and could not—be prevented, nor justice established, without the abolition of the parasitic state, its military, police, laws, and capitalist class rule. This is the historic task of the working class, rallying behind it the petty bourgeoisie and the oppressed masses, as part of the united struggle of the South Asian and international working class for socialist policies.
Chemmani Mass Graves on August 01, 2025. Photo courtesy of Kumanan Kana Facebook page.
At the close of the 28th day of the second phase of excavations at the newly uncovered Chemmani–Ariyalai “Siththupaththi” Hindu Cemetery mass grave in Jaffna, 147 skeletons have been exhumed—among them toddlers, children, and babies less than twelve months old. The remains were unearthed in a pit as shallow as two feet, scattered without order—some bodies stacked atop one another, some with bent limbs suggesting they were buried alive. All were stripped of clothing, with clear signs of on-the-spot killings of women alongside their babies, hurried burials, and accompanied by chilling artifacts: a school bag identical to those donated by UNESCO in the 1990s, a baby’s toy and a feeding bottle, small glass bangles, socks, slippers, a suspected machine gun barrel, and fractured skulls. These discoveries, together with already available reports and evidence, leave no doubt that these were not the victims of natural disaster or random violence, but of a systematic, state-organised campaign of mass murder.
The ongoing excavation, conducted under the supervision of Jaffna Magistrate A.A. Anandarajah and led by archaeologist Professor Raj Somadeva, was temporarily halted on August 6 and is scheduled to resume on August 22. On August 3 and 4, this writer visited the site and spoke directly with the Magistrate; J. Thathparan, Executive Director of the Office of Missing Persons (OMP); and Professor Somadeva. All confirmed the significance of the discovery—not only for the scale of barbarism and human tragedy it reveals, but also for the irrefutable evidence it provides of crimes committed against innocent civilians.
From left at the Chemmani grave site, August 3, 2025: Jaffna Magistrate A.A. Anandarajah; J. Thathparan, Executive Director of the Office of Missing Persons (OMP); and the writer. Photo credit Kumanan Kana facebook page.
Chemmani from 1998 to today: Linking State Military to the Graves
One does not have to grope around to relate these mass graves to the Sri Lankan armed forces who occupied Jaffna after 1995. It is an indisputable fact—even acknowledged by ultra-right Sinhala racists—that mass graves exist and massacres were carried out by the state military. Alarmed by the Chemmani exhumations, racist warmonger Udaya Gammanpila, leader of the Pivithuru Hela Urumaya and a former minister, told the media: “The North is war-ravaged, so mass graves will appear anywhere. Digging them up and commenting [on them] is pointless and a waste of money.”
Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) reported in December 1997: “The fate of about 600 people who disappeared from Jaffna Peninsula in recent times is unknown”. The name “Chemmani” entered the world’s attention in July 1998, when Sri Lanka Army Corporal Dewage Somaratna Rajapaksha, convicted for the rape and murder of 18-year-old Tamil schoolgirl Krishanthi Kumaraswamy, told the Colombo High Court: “We didn’t kill anyone. We only buried bodies. We can show you where 300 to 400 bodies have been buried.”
In Jaffna Magistrate Court, just prior to exhumations in June 1999, he said, “I can show you how people were arrested in Ariyalai, tortured and buried…I can show you 10 places in Chemmani where bodies are buried. The other four convicted with me can show another six places.”
Rajapaksha’s testimony exposed a network of clandestine mass graves in the Jaffna area, containing hundreds of civilians who had “disappeared” following the Sri Lankan military’s recapture of the peninsula in 1995. In the late 1990s, limited excavations at Chemmani confirmed the remains of 15 individuals, but political obstruction, witness intimidation, procedural impediments, and the deliberate tampering with evidence ensured that most sites remained untouched for over two decades—like many other mass graves scattered across the country.
The present Ariyalai mass grave—only a short distance from the original Chemmani site—confirms the truth of Rajapaksha’s claims and directly links the Sri Lankan army to these atrocities. Media reports from the period documented hundreds of Tamil civilians vanishing after being stopped at military checkpoints and round-ups. The close proximity of the central army camp at Chemmani at the time, few yards away from the burial site, random placement of the skeletons, absence of clothing, a military item found with the bodies, and evidence of blunt force trauma all fit the established pattern of military abductions, torture, and summary executions.
The fractured skull of a victim found on August 6, 2025 at the Chemmani mass grave. Photo credit: Shabeer Mohamed.
State repression: from the North to the South
The AHRC documented the systematic nature of disappearances, noting in December 1997 that more than 16,700 cases had been verified in the South during the 1988–90 counterinsurgency against the fascist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). Only in isolated instances were prosecutions initiated against the perpetrators, and almost all of these resulted in no convictions. In both the South and the North, the Sri Lankan ruling elite deployed the full apparatus of the state—the military and police, death squads, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and emergency regulations that served as a legal licence to kill and dispose of bodies with impunity, along with the use of mass graves—to eliminate perceived threats to capitalist rule from the political right and, above all, against the innocent rural poor and the oppressed.
There were, however, differences in the methods of disposal. In the South, tyre pyres—burning corpses in public—were used to terrorise the population and demonstrate the cost of defiance. In the North and East, the army often concealed its crimes, burying the bodies in remote or controlled areas to evade scrutiny while continuing the repression.
These were not “excesses” or “aberrations,” but the outcome of deliberate class policy. The AHRC identified seven patterns behind disappearances, including direct political decisions to eliminate thousands as a precondition for introducing free-market economic policies, and the use of 1965 Indonesian-style mass killings as a model for repression.
Successive governments, shared crimes
The Chemmani mass graves, like nearly two dozen others uncovered around the island, indict not only the military but every government—UNP, SLFP, SLPP, and now NPP/JVP—that has presided over a regime of impunity for state violence.
The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which today attempts to posture as a “clean” and democratic force, played a key role in the nationalist, chauvinist, and militarist campaigns that legitimised repression in both the North and the South—at least since July 1987, when the reactionary Indo–Sri Lanka Accord was signed. The JVP did so while entering into coalition governments with former presidents Chandrika Kumaratunga and Mahinda Rajapaksa. The JVP’s hands are soaked in the blood of Tamils. Its current silence on Chemmani speaks volumes about its real class allegiance—to the capitalist state and imperialism, which it defends against the working class and the poor.
Militarization, Intimidation, and Suppression
In the South, it was only after 1994—when President Kumaratunga came to power with phony pledges of truth and justice to the families of the disappeared—that limited space was opened for victims of state terror under the UNP government and of JVP fascists to lodge even police complaints. Soon, the military was elevated to the highest esteem by the People’s Alliance (PA) government in resuming the war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The continued militarization and repression in the North did not spare the South, where abductions were commonplace under president Rajapaksa’s reinvigorated war, keeping the working class and all dissenters in a state of terror. All throughout, the JVP waged a sinister chauvinist campaign supporting the war. Today, retired military officers have largely found a safe haven under the JVP/NPP government. These were the conditions that prevented the aggrieved relatives of the disappeared from pursuing judicial processes, while the police and military actively intervened to block prosecutions.
Nationalist traps and the dead-end of appeals to imperialism
Neither Tamil nationalist organisations operating in the North or Colombo, nor the Tamil diaspora—whose real aim is to secure an elite self-rule in the North and East to safeguard their privileges against the Tamil working class and poor—offer any way forward. Their appeals to the United Nations, Western governments, and international human rights bodies have only been pretexts, largely for US imperialism to exert pressure on Colombo into submission. These are the very same imperialist powers that provided military, intelligence, and diplomatic backing to Colombo during the war.
Similarly, Sinhala nationalism justifies past and present massacres under the cover of “protecting the unitary state” and defending “national security.” Both ethnic nationalisms serve to divide the working class, the only social force capable of ending the cycle of repression and impunity.
Massacres as class war
Like the massacres in the South during 1988–90, those in the North and East during the 1983–2009 anti-Tamil civil war were not simply crimes committed against an ethnic minority, but primarily acts of class war. The victims—whether rural Sinhala youth accused of JVP links, or Tamil villagers suspected of aiding the LTTE—were overwhelmingly drawn from the working class, unemployed youth and oppressed rural poor. Their elimination was intended to crush political opposition and terrorise the masses into accepting the “open economy” policies demanded by the local bourgeoisie and international finance capital.
As the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) has emphatically explained, there has been—and will be—no justice for the victims of the South without justice for the victims of the North, and vice versa. The capitalist state, founded in 1948 on communal division, cannot and will not prosecute itself.
The way forward: a socialist programme for the working class and the Oppressed
The ICFI advances a clear perspective for ending repression and securing genuine justice: the independent political mobilisation of the working class, uniting Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim workers in the struggle for a Sri Lanka–Eelam United Socialist States, as part of the Union of Socialist Republics of South Asia.
This requires building a revolutionary party grounded in the Trotskyist programme of permanent revolution, fighting to unite the oppressed rural and urban poor, along with unemployed youth, behind the leadership of the working class. The middle class and petty bourgeoisie must break from nationalist illusions and join forces with their true class brothers and sisters, both nationally and internationally.
The truth is that justice will not come from The Hague, Geneva, or Washington, but from the victory of the working class over the capitalist system that breeds war, dictatorship, and mass murder. The graves at Chemmani are not merely relics of past atrocities—they are a warning of what the Sri Lankan state will resort to again if the working class suffers another defeat. This is not a distant possibility but a living reality, demonstrated before our eyes in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians by imperialist-backed Zionist Israel.
Reposted below is the WSWS.org Perspective published here on August 08, 2025.
Palestinians struggle to get food and humanitarian aid from the back of a truck as it moves along the Morag corridor near Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, Monday, Aug. 4, 2025 [AP Photo/Mariam Dagga]
The decision by the security cabinet of Israel’s fascistic government to expand its military occupation of the Gaza Strip will mean death for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and presages their final ethnic cleansing. Workers and young people who want to stop this barbarism must construct a socialist movement in the working class against the Zionist regime and its imperialist patrons.
The phased plan proposes the military conquest of the Gaza Strip, including Gaza City, Khan Younis and other refugee camps, where at least a million displaced Palestinians are located. Responding to tactical concerns expressed by the Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir of an unnecessary loss of military personnel and endangering the 20 hostages still held by Hamas, open talk of permanent annexation has given way to a proposal to hold the captured areas for five months with a new security perimeter set up inside the enclave, while Hamas is eliminated and the remaining hostages are freed. This is to be followed supposedly by some unspecified form of Arab control.
Behind this rhetorical shift, mass murder and ethnic cleansing are still on the order of the day. The IDF has already issued new enforced displacement orders in parts of Gaza City in the north and Khan Younis in the south. A military spokesman said ground troops were preparing to “expand the scope of combat operations.”
One million people, around half of the enclave’s population, will initially be driven south toward the Mawasi “humanitarian zone”—a concentration camp—after which a military offensive will be launched in the ethnically cleansed area. Many of these people, who are already starving and have been displaced multiple times since the genocide began, will die en route.
This is a genocide carried out by the Zionist regime but made in Washington, Berlin and London.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ability to escalate the extermination and expulsion of the Palestinians is made possible by the unconditional support his government enjoys from the imperialist powers that have flooded weapons and other war materiel to the Zionist regime. Indeed, President Trump greenlighted Netanyahu’s plan when he declared on August 5, “So Israel is going to have to make a decision. … It’s going to be pretty much up to Israel.”
Since the outset of Israel’s latest onslaught on Gaza in October 2023, the imperialist governments have combined their arming of Israel with efforts to crush popular opposition to the genocide at home by deploying police violence and smear campaigns branding anti-genocide activists as “antisemites.”
But the decades-long support for the Zionist regime by the imperialist powers goes back to the creation in 1948 of a Jewish-exclusivist state in the British mandate of Palestine. As the Fourth International explained in May 1948, the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and Arab territories “is a compromise between the imperialist robbers” in the US and Britain aimed at securing their positions in the region. Partition would “throttle the anti-imperialist fight of the masses, while Zionists and Arab feudalists will vie for imperialist favours,” the Fourth International warned.
Nearly eight decades on, the imperialists can only preserve Israel as a bridgehead for their domination over the Middle East by backing the annihilation of the Palestinians.
The determination on the part of Washington and its European accomplices to facilitate the genocide and crack down on any opposition flows from their desperate striving to advance their predatory economic and geopolitical interests amid a global capitalist breakdown. The same antagonisms between the major powers that led to two world wars in the last century have created the conditions for a third imperialist world war, which threatens the very survival of humanity.
The initial stages of this conflict are well underway, with the genocide of the Palestinians serving as a component of US imperialism’s push to secure unchallenged hegemony over the oil-rich Middle East. At the same time, the imperialist gangsters are waging a war against Russia with the aim of reducing it to a semi-colonial status and preparing a war on China to block its economic rise. The imperialists’ readiness to sanction the slaughter of an entire people provides an indication of the barbarism of which they are capable in pursuit of raw materials, markets, pools of labour and geostrategic influence.
The despotic Arab regimes continue to vie for imperialist favours and are deeply complicit in mass murder. For the Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi and other Gulf ruling elites, their main concern is to serve as junior partners in Washington’s war of regional conquest and plunder, forming an anti-Iranian alliance, without provoking an upsurge of the oppressed Arab working class against their rule. Thus their refusal to offer any opposition to the genocide beyond hypocritical statements of concern and proposals to orchestrate the expulsion of the Palestinians, i.e., carry out a crime against humanity more “humanely.” On the very day that Netanyahu discussed the expansion of military operations in Gaza with his security cabinet, Egypt inked a joint deal with the Zionist regime for the export of natural gas worth an estimated $35 billion.
The Zionists and their imperialist paymasters have succeeded for nearly two years in carrying through their criminal “final solution” of the Palestinian question thanks above all to the despicable conduct of the social democratic parties, trade unions and their political hangers-on. Parties like Labour in Britain and Germany’s Social Democrats that are in government have supplied Netanyahu’s fascist regime with weapons and military equipment and outlawed popular opposition. The trade unions in all of the major imperialist centres have systematically suppressed opposition in the working class to the genocide, ignoring the appeal of Palestinian trade unions at its outset for global solidarity actions to halt Israel’s onslaught.
Millions of workers and young people have taken to the streets around the world to express their outrage over the genocide. However, the social democratic and Stalinist parties, as well as the pseudo-left organisations and campaign groups in their orbit, have shackled protesters to the bankrupt strategy of moral appeals meant to pressure the very imperialist war criminals responsible for butchering the Palestinians.
The urgent task facing the working class in the imperialist centres is to mobilise its immense social power to halt the Gaza genocide and the war machine responsible for its implementation. Workers throughout manufacturing, transportation, and other key sectors must organise themselves in defiance of the union bureaucracy to fight for the following demands:
An immediate halt to shipment of all weapons to Israel.
The boycott of all trade and other economic activity with Israel.
US, European and other corporations assisting Israel in carrying out the genocide must be indicted and prosecuted.
The arrest of Israeli officials for war crimes.
The end of repression of the opposition to the Gaza genocide.
The immediate and unhindered access to Gaza for the supply of aid via all available land crossings.
These demands can only be enforced through the initiation of an industrial and political struggle by the working class. This week’s strike at Boeing, at the very heart of the US war machine, underscores the real basis for the development of a mass movement against imperialist war and the horrendous crimes it produces.
Strikes and a refusal to produce and handle goods destined for Israel must be combined with sustained efforts to broaden the struggle to other sections of workers and young people. Resolutions should be adopted by workers and delegations sent to other workplaces aimed at mobilising the working class all over the world to stop imperialist barbarism by taking up the fight for socialism.
