මෙහි ගැබ්වන ඉදිරි දර්ශනය ලෝක සමාජවාදී වෙබ් අඩවියේ, “කම්කරු පන්තිය, ධනපති ම්ලේච්ඡත්වයට එරෙහි සටන සහ සමාජවාදී විප්ලවයේ ලෝක පක්ෂය ගොඩනැගීම (The working class, the fight against capitalist barbarism, and the building of the World Party of Socialist Revolution)” යන මැයෙන් කොටස් හතරකින් යුතුව පළ කර ඇති ඉදිරි දර්ශනයට ලියූ පූර්විකාවක් වැනිය.
This week, poet Ahnaf Jazeem, a former victim of Sri Lanka’s draconian terrorism law, filed a petition in the Supreme Court challenging the government’s proposed new Anti-Terrorism Bill. This new law is to replace the existing Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), which, since its enactment in 1979 by former President J.R.Jayawardena government, was extensively used by successive governments against Tamil and Muslim youth and political opponents in the North and South of the country, to kidnap, detain, torture and kill and remand for years without trial.
Jazeem pleads from court a declaration “that the Bill in its entire content, is antidemocratic, infringes the foundational democratic fabric of the society and the democratic aspirations of the Sri Lankan people, and therefore unconstitutional, and lacks fundamental qualities required of a law for the same to be placed for approval by legislators even with a two third majority, and does not meet the threshold of democratic quality required to qualify it to be placed before the people to be approved by the People at a referendum.” The mechanism referred to here is how even “unconstitutional” laws are passed as law under the constitution of the island. Jazeem, contrary to almost all other petitioners, have refused to enforce this anti-democratic procedure.
Ahnaf Jazeem
Jazeem is the eldest son of a Muslim family of five children of a poor farmer and day-labourer, residing in Mannar, some 300Km North to the capital Colombo. He is the author of Tamil poetry anthology, Navarasam [nine moods] published in 2017. After graduation he was employed as a Tamil Language teacher. On May 16, 2020, Jazeem was arrested by the Police Counter-Terrorism and Investigation Division (TID) allegedly on the suspicion of having “published books on and taught his students ‘extremism’ and ‘racism”. He was then wrongfully detained under the orders of ousted President Rajapaksa for thirteen months, during which period he was subjected to severe physical and mental torture including being cuffed to a table day and night continuously for five months, and forced to record a self-incriminating statement.
Incarcerated in remand custody thereafter, Jazeem was granted bail in mid June 2021 on strict conditions. The case against him on a false charge of ‘indoctrinating’ his students under the PTA concluded with Jazeems’s acquittal in December last year, without even requiring to call proof in his defence. His freedom was secured by mass support he gathered from around the world. He is yet arbitrarily listed as a designated person, who the government believes “commit or attempt to commit, participate in or facilitate the commission of, terrorist acts”, by the Ministry of Defence.
The petition states that it is with this personal experience of being a victim of the existing terrorism law that Jazeem is challenging the proposed law. Jazeem was prosecuted as part of the racist anti-Muslim witch-hunt of the then Sirisena-Wickremasinghe government and then of the Rajapaksa government.
The proposed law will apply within or outside the territorial limits of Sri Lanka. The government commits to “protect other sovereign nations and their people from the scourge of acts of terrorism”, which lays down the readiness of the Sri Lankan ruling class to support imperialism and states of the type of Zionist Israel, so that any agitation by the people against such support of war by the government will be declared unlawful and as an act of “terrorism”.
Any person, who commits any act or illegal omission specified in the law, with the intention of (a) “intimidating” the public or a section of the public; (b) wrongfully or unlawfully “compelling” the Government of Sri Lanka, or any other Government, or an international organization, to do or to abstain from doing any act; or (c) propagating war or, “violating” territorial integrity or “infringement” of sovereignty of Sri Lanka or any other sovereign country, commits the offence of “terrorism”. This definition of terrorism is overly broad and could easily be used against political dissent.
Number of other clauses in the Bill that define offences “are overly broad, and draconian and will have ripple and chilling effect on the democratic fabric of the society and upon the democratic rights of the people of the country, especially the working people, the marginalized, ethnic minorities, the political dissidents hostile to government austerity policies and to freedom of expression and journalism,” the petition states.
Punishments for the offences under the law reach upto twenty years of imprisonment to life sentence.
The law also proposes unprecedented powers to the executive President and administrative officers in respect of detention, rehabilitation and laying down regulations in respect of the offences.
Under Clause 31 (1)(b) of the Bill, a detention order sought by the Inspector General of Police (IGP) or any officer not below the rank of a Deputy Inspector General of Police authorised by the IGP could be issued by the Secretary to the Ministry of Defence. Under PTA, it is the Minister who has this power. This removes all authority of a Magistrate to review the justification for the deprivation of liberty, and that too for a minimum period of 2 months, extendable to a maximum period of one year.
The law will alarmingly enable a police officer together with a Deputy IGP to remove a suspect from under judicially supervised custody to executive controlled custody (administrative detention), without establishing the commission of an offence, and in any event, even if an offence had been committed, by merely reporting an allegation.
The law will legitimize an existing practice whereby persons in detention are compelled by the Attorney General (AG) to accept ‘rehabilitation’ which in effect is a form of punishment without finding of guilt. The danger is that an executive office, the AG, is empowered to compel a person into acceptance of or impose a penalty without proving guilt. The President is empowered to specify places of detention.
Under clause 79 of the Bill, the President will be empowered to designate any organization as a proscribed organization, which power could be used against opponent non-governmental organizations, trade unions, action committees, political parties, media institutions and persons.
These egregious provisions of this law will also enable the President, after an application is made to the High Court by the AG and court stamp is obtained, to issue “restriction orders” against a person who has committed or is preparing to commit an offence stipulated in the law. The President, on the recommendation made by the IGP or the Commanders of armed forces may also designate any public place to be a “prohibited place”.
These powers will strengthen the already dictatorial powers of the president and create conditions for a police state.
President Ranil Wickremesinghe. (Image courtesy of island.lk)
The capitalist ruling class is amassing its armory against the working class: including the Public Security Ordinance, ICCPR Act, the colonial Penal Code, Establishment Code, Essential Public Services Act, Bureau of Rehabilitation Act and some other laws. Yesterday (24), the Parliament passed another historically unprecedented repressive law, the Online Safety Act (OSA), to block internet freedom, social media activity and largely freedom of expression of any sort. The government is now able to declare, through a commission, what is “true” or “false” on its own and arrest, detain and prosecute anyone who states otherwise.
President Wickremasinghe’s government is committed to implementing harsh austerity measures dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on the shoulders of the working people and the oppressed. His government is extremely discredited, and even has no popular mandate, as his predecessor was ousted by mass struggles in April-July 2022. New laws and repressive measures like “Yukthiya”, a mass intimidation campaign in the guise of “war against drugs”, yet a lighter version of the Duterte-type, are being used against striking workers, demonstrations and student protests.
Wickremasinghe effectively declared war on the working people just as he was parachuted to the presidency in a constitutional coup through the Parliament, an institution utterly hated by the People. The working people are faced with a social counter-revolution. Defending democratic rights and the fight against austerity need the mass mobilization of its class, around their own rank-and-file organizations, across ethnicities and trades, nationally and internationally, to usurp political power to re-arrange the society on socialist lines.
Statement of the WSWS International Editorial Board
We post below the Statement of the World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board, published in WSWS.org on January 13, 2024. We, theSocialist.LK endorse this statement in its entirety and invite our readers to carefully peruse it and grasp it for actions ahead.
The World Socialist Web Site unequivocally condemns Thursday’s attack by the United States and United Kingdom against Yemen. With no popular mandate, with no congressional or parliamentary authorization, without even an attempt at a serious explanation, the Biden administration in the US and the Sunak government in the UK have carried out an illegal act of war against an impoverished nation.
The aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the fast combat support ship USNS Supply transit the Strait of Hormuz, Dec. 14, 2023. [Photo: Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Keith Nowak ]
The attack on Yemen is a major escalation of the developing war in the Middle East. Since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the US and its imperialist allies in NATO have overseen a massive militarization of the region, directly targeting Iran. This is itself part of an expanding global war, including the US-NATO war against Russia and the developing economic and military conflict against China.
US President Joe Biden did not even see fit to go on national television to explain the launching of a new war, under conditions in which there is overwhelming popular opposition to the expansion of war in the Middle East. As the Pentagon was planning to attack Yemen, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was admitted to the intensive care unit of Walter Reed Hospital, with the knowledge of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but unbeknownst to the president. This bizarre episode underscored the reality that US war-making is operating on autopilot, increasingly outside the pretense of civilian oversight.
As always, the rationale provided to justify the war is a pack of lies. Biden declared that the missile strikes were “defensive” and “a direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks.” The American media, with the same breathless reporting that has accompanied every US military operation, proclaims that a country with a gross domestic product 700 times smaller than the United States is carrying out “intolerable” actions, against which the American military is “forced” to defend itself. Overnight, Yemen’s Houthis have been turned into a new bogeyman, requiring urgent military action without any discussion or explanation.
In coordination with the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the United States has dispatched to the Middle East a massive military armada, consisting of two aircraft carrier battle groups, multiple guided missile destroyers, an unknown number of submarines and dozens of warplanes. These forces have provided logistics, reconnaissance, and target selection to Israel in a deliberate effort to provoke retaliation from Iran and its allied forces such as the Houthis.
Yet, supposedly it is Yemen that is the “aggressor,” carrying out “unprecedented attacks” on US military forces deployed in the Red Sea, thousands of miles from the US border. American imperialism, which has a military larger than that of the next 10 countries combined, claims to be waging a “defensive” war on the other side of the world against a small, oppressed and impoverished country.
“We’re not interested in a war with Yemen,” asserted the Pentagon on Friday, “We’re not interested in a conflict of any kind.”
In fact, the imperialist powers have been waging a war against the population of Yemen for nearly a decade. The Houthis in Yemen have been subject to ruthless slaughter, waged by Saudi Arabia but armed and financed by the United States. According to the United Nations, 377,000 people have been killed in a genocidal campaign that has involved blockades resulting in mass starvation and disease. First under Obama and then under Trump, the US financed this assault with more than $54 billion in military equipment, aided and abetted by its imperialist allies, including the UK.
The devastation of Yemen is part of more than 30 years of unending and expanding war, spearheaded and led by American imperialism, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. This included the first Gulf War in 1990; the dismantling of Yugoslavia, culminating in the war against Serbia in 1999; the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001; the second war against Iraq in 2003; the war against Libya in 2011; and the CIA-backed civil war in Syria that began the same year.
Every single administration since that of Bill Clinton has authorized military operations, airstrikes, and destabilization operations in Somalia, across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen, seeking to control the critical waterway leading to the Suez Canal.
The launching of military strikes against Yemen marks a new stage in the deepening imperialist military offensive throughout the Middle East and beyond. The US and its imperialist allies are waging a de facto war against Iran, working to eliminate Iran’s military allies throughout the Middle East. The strikes against Yemen are directed at encircling Iran and provoking it into retaliation against US forces, which could be used to justify a full-scale war against Tehran.
The immediate antecedent for the escalating war in the Middle East, of which the genocide in Gaza is a part, is the collapse of Ukraine’s “spring offensive.” But the imperialist powers are doubling down. “Backing Ukraine is key to the West’s security,” declares The Economist, while Foreign Affairs asserts that “Victory Is Ukraine’s Only True Path to Peace.”
Overriding all of this, the United States is involved in a struggle to fend off the challenge posed by China to its global hegemony, which threatens to trigger a shooting war in the Pacific. In the US media and political circles, there is growing talk of a new “axis of evil” involving Iran, China and Russia.
Each one of these conflicts cannot be understood in isolation. The bombing of Yemen is part of a global counter-revolution, in which the imperialist powers are seeking to reestablish direct control over their former colonies.
The countries carrying out this agenda are the old imperialist powers: the US, UK, France, and Germany. The British ruling class, unable to carry through its policies independently, seeks to exploit the so-called special relationship, that is, Britain’s role as the principal ally of American imperialism, to advance its own interests on a global stage.
Every war launched by the US and its imperialist allies has ended in one bloody debacle after the other, with millions of people killed. But each disaster only reinforces the determination of US imperialism to use war as a means to secure its global hegemony.
American Imperialism, to paraphrase the words of Leon Trotsky, is “tobogganing towards disaster with eyes closed.”
Over the past three months, millions of people all over the world have marched in protest of the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. The US strikes on Yemen occurred on the same day as the International Court of Justice heard devastating evidence that Israel, and by extension the United States, were responsible for genocide in Gaza.
The response of US imperialism to these mass popular protests and exposures of its war crimes has been to accelerate its war plans. This is because the eruption of war, genocide and political repression is not an aberration. Imperialism, as Lenin explained, is not merely a policy, but rather a specific historical stage of capitalist development. Opposition to imperialism is, therefore, a revolutionary question.
It is not a matter of appealing to the capitalist governments responsible for these crimes to alter course, but rather mobilizing the working class, fusing the struggle against war with the developing struggles of workers all over the world against inequality and exploitation. The logic of these struggles requires the conquest of political power by workers all over the world, the expropriation of the capitalist oligarchs and war criminals, and the socialist reorganization of economic life on a world scale.
