Front from left to right: Markus Söder (CSU), Friedrich Merz (CDU) and Lars Klingbeil (SPD) present the coalition agreement [AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi]
On Tuesday afternoon, Friedrich Merz (CDU) was elected in the second round of voting and subsequently appointed as the new German Chancellor by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD).
Merz had initially failed in the first ballot—a unique occurrence in German post-war history. With 621 MPs present, Merz was six votes short of the required majority of 316 votes to become Chancellor: 310 MPs voted for him, 307 against him, there were three abstentions, and one vote was invalid. Nine MPs did not take part in the vote.
Merz’s unexpected non-election had caused feverish nervousness in all Bundestag parties. In the end, the Bundestag parties agreed to schedule a second round of voting on the same day.
Shortly before the vote, the notoriously right-wing CDU/CSU parliamentary group leader Jens Spahn announced that a new ballot would be held with the agreement of the CDU/CSU, SPD, Green and Left Party parliamentary groups. The whole of Europe, perhaps even the whole world, was watching this election. He then thanked everyone who had made a second round of voting possible so quickly.
The role of the Left Party and the Greens as essentially right-wing parties of the state could not be clearer: in the face of a looming political crisis in Berlin, they played a key role in installing Merz and paving the way for his extreme right-wing government.
The Merz government heralds a new stage in the rightward evolution of the ruling class. It is undoubtedly the most reactionary and anti-working class government since the fall of the Nazi regime 80 years ago. Its central aim is to remove the last restraints imposed on German militarism as a result of its unprecedented crimes in the Second World War. With the adoption of war credits amounting to €1 trillion on March 18, the Bundestag has already paved the way for a massive military build-up.
The coalition government of the CDU/Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) will not only rearm like Hitler. It will organise a historic onslaught on social spending to finance rearmament and establish a police state to enforce it against the enormous opposition among the population. Domestically, it will also adopt the refugee policy of the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) and help the fascists’ nationalistically charged “cultural policy” achieve a breakthrough.
Leading members of the government, such as Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and State Secretary for Culture Wolfram Weimer, are politically far to the right and could easily be members of the AfD. Chancellor Merz himself embodies the interests of the financial oligarchy like no other. For four years, he headed the German branch of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager.
The SPD, which was founded more than 150 years ago under the banner of Marxism, is now the organiser of this shift to the right as a right-wing state party. Yesterday, it announced that Boris Pistorius (SPD) will remain Minister of Defense under Merz. Pistorius personifies the “new era” in foreign policy ushered in by SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who received a farewell at a militaristic spectacle on Monday evening. Pistorius has set himself the goal of making Germany “fit for war” again and preparing it for a direct war against the nuclear-armed power Russia.
Party leader Lars Klingbeil takes over as Vice-Chancellor and Finance Minister. In this role, he will ensure that the costs of horrendous military spending and escalating global trade wars are borne by the working population. He will work closely with the new SPD Labor Minister Bärbel Bas, who, as a nominal “party leftist,” will push through the brutal cuts in close cooperation with the trade unions.
The coalition agreement signed yesterday reflects the reactionary personnel of the new government. The focus is on war policy and the comprehensive militarisation of society. The following goals, among others, are mentioned:
Dominance over Europe and a role for German imperialism as a world power
In the coalition agreement, the CDU/CSU and SPD define the entire globe as a zone of influence for German imperialism. According to the agreement, the German government is striving for an Africa policy that “does justice to the strategic importance of Africa,” declares that the “Indo-Pacific region” is “of elementary interest” and announces that it intends to “continue to show a presence in the region.” The “expansion of strategic partnerships with the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean” is also “of particular importance.” Overall, the aim is to “intensify bilateral relations with the countries of the Global South and expand them into a global network.”
As in the past, this global power politics means German support for genocide and war. The coalition declares the “security of Israel” to be a “fundamental German national security interest”—in the midst of the genocide committed by the far-right Netanyahu regime against the Palestinian population. At the same time, it assures the Islamist forces in Syria of support “in the stabilisation and economic reconstruction of the country”—in order to gain geopolitical influence and deport refugees.
With regard to the war against Russia, the coalition agreement announces that “military, civilian and political support for Ukraine will be substantially strengthened and reliably continued together with partners.” Germany must “for the first time since the end of the Second World War … be in a position to guarantee its own security to a much greater extent.” Germany will assume “a leading role” in the further development of the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP).
Militarisation of schools and universities
“We are anchoring our Bundeswehr [Armed Forces] even more firmly in public life and are committed to strengthening the role of youth officers, who fulfil an important educational mission in schools,” it says on page 130 in the section on “Defence policy.” It continues: “We are committed to dismantling obstacles that impede dual-use research or civil-military research cooperation, for example.” We will “eliminate the deficit that exists in Germany in the area of strategic security research and advocate its promotion in the sense of a networked understanding of security.”
Reintroduction of compulsory military service
“We are creating a new, attractive military service that is initially based on voluntary service,” explain the coalition partners. The design of this service will be based on “the criteria of attractiveness, meaningfulness and contribution to the ability to grow.” In doing so, “the Swedish military service model” is being used as a guide and “the conditions for military registration and monitoring will be created this year.”
Development of a war economy and massive armaments industry
The planning and procurement system will be “reformed” and “new implementation paths” will be enforced for major projects and future technologies. In particular, “future technologies for the Bundeswehr” are to be promoted, including “satellite systems, artificial intelligence, unmanned (also combat-capable) systems, electronic warfare, cyber, software-defined defence and cloud applications as well as hypersonic systems.” This requires “simplified access and increased exchange with research institutions, the academic sector, start-ups and industry.”
The “special infrastructure fund” of €500 billion is also designed to prepare for war. “We are simplifying the definition of requirements and approval for military construction projects and creating exemptions in construction, environmental and public procurement law as well as in the protection and dedication of military land with a Federal Armed Forces Infrastructure Acceleration Act,” it says on page 132. The “concerns and infrastructure measures for overall defence” are to be “established as an overriding public interest and prioritised in implementation over other state tasks.”
The historic rearmament and war policy will be financed by equally historic attacks on the working class. “We will make a considerable contribution to consolidation in this legislative period,” it says in the section on “budget consolidation.” The agreement only mentions a few specific measures—such as cutting citizens’ benefits—but the role model is clear: the US, where the Trump regime is ruthlessly cutting social spending in the interests of the financial oligarchy and destroying all existing social rights.
The deeply anti-worker policy of the new federal government is based on the support of all Bundestag (Federal Parliament) parties. The Greens provided the CDU/CSU and SPD with the necessary two-thirds majority in the Bundestag to pass the war credits. The Left Party backed it in the Bundesrat (Federal Council). And the trade unions are also firmly on the side of the government. They reaffirmed their loyalty to the rearmament course and worked systematically in recent weeks to isolate the wage struggles at the post office, in the public sector and at the Berlin Transport Company, and to prevent a joint all-out strike by the working class.
The broad support for militarism and social spending cuts by all Bundestag parties and trade unions shows that the struggle against fascism, war and social inequality can only be waged through the independent mobilisation of the working class. In its statement on the formation of the government, the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) therefore called for “the establishment of rank-and-file committees in workplaces and neighbourhoods that will allow workers to take the fight against mass redundancies and wage cuts into their own hands and combine it with the fight against war.”
The statement continues:
We counterpose the international unity of the workers to the growth of nationalism, trade war and rearmament. The war can only be stopped and social and democratic rights can only be defended if capitalism itself is abolished and replaced by a socialist society in which people’s needs, not profit interests, take centre stage. The big banks and corporations must be expropriated and placed under democratic control.
This article was originally published in the World Socialist Web Site Here
The US federal debt [Photo: Federal Reserve Economic Database]
On Saturday, May 3, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org) held the annual International Online May Day Rally. The event took place at a critical juncture in international geopolitics, which determines life-and-death questions of the working class—who, in recent weeks and months, have demonstrated growing militancy in their struggles against the capitalist establishment. WSWS posted both the video and text of the opening speech delivered by WSWS International Editorial Board chairman David North today (May 05). We are reposting the video here and we invite the workers, youth, intellectuals and all those who want to defeat austerity, fascism, dictatorship, genocide, war and social retrogression to seriously study this speech and the other speeches, and resolutely decide to join the international Trotskyist movement and build the ICFI as the only revolutionary leadership of the international working class to fight for world socialism.
At first, it was just a quiet murmur in relatively isolated sections of the financial press. Today, however, the voices are growing louder: the US dollar could lose its role as the world’s global currency amid the breakdown of all the arrangements and mechanisms of the post-war period under the impact of the US economic war against the world initiated by President Trump.
A street money exchanger poses for a photo without showing his face as he counts U.S. dollars at Ferdowsi square, Tehran’s go-to venue for foreign currency exchange, in downtown Tehran, Iran, Saturday, April 5, 2025. [AP Photo/Vahid Salemi]
This week, the Financial Times (FT) ran a major article under the headline “Is the world losing faith in the almighty US dollar?” The answer was that it is.
The concern has been sparked by an unusual development in financial markets. Under “normal” conditions, financial disturbances bring about a rise in the dollar’s value as investors seek a safe haven and move to acquire US Treasury bonds.
But since so-called “liberation day,” when Trump unveiled his “reciprocal tariffs,” there has been a move out of US government debt, and the value of the dollar has fallen. The price of gold, a real store of value, as opposed to debt and credit, continues to reach record highs.
There was a slowing of this movement when Trump announced a 90-day pause on the reciprocal tariffs, which range between 30 and 50 percent for a wide range of countries, to allow for negotiations. But the question remains: What happens after the pause ends?
Whatever the immediate answer, one thing is certain: There will be no return to the status quo ante, with Trump warning that nobody “gets off the hook.” This week, talks took place between the administration and Japan in Washington. The Japanese trade representative returned home empty-handed.
The implications of the new situation were underscored in a comment by a leading FT columnist, Rana Foroohar, entitled “America the Unstable.”
Foroohar began by saying that her “takeaway” from the tariff chaos and fallout was that America, under Trump, has become an “emerging market.”
In previous periods of political and economic stress, US equities and the currency rose because of the “haven status” of the dollar.
“It didn’t seem to matter that all the things that had bolstered American companies from low rates to financial engineering to globalization itself were tapped out. US asset markets seemed impervious to the notion of the dollar-doomsday scenario that would send both the currency and asset prices tumbling. Trump has finally ended America’s exorbitant privilege.”
She concluded by saying that previously she would have ruled out the possibility that America could become the epicenter of an emerging market-style debt crisis, but “not anymore.”
Trump’s measures—the tariff hikes that will slow the economy and proposed tax cuts for corporations—will add trillions of dollars to what is increasingly being characterized as an “unsustainable” debt mountain, currently at $36 trillion and rising.
In a report issued earlier this month, George Saravelos, global head of foreign exchange research at Deutsche Bank, summed up the growing outlook in leading global financial circles.
“Despite President Trump’s reversal on tariffs, the damage to the USD has been done,” he wrote in a report. “The market is reassessing the structural attractiveness of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and is undergoing a process of de-dollarization.”
However, the crisis is not merely a product of Trump’s actions. It has been long in the making—the outcome of a protracted decline in the economic position of the US.
Trump, as is now openly acknowledged, has taken an axe to the economic, trade, and financial mechanisms set in place after World War II, considering that they have contributed decisively to the weakening of the US.
Of course, Trump, for whom, like Henry Ford, “history is bunk,” never explains why they were put in place and why the US played the leading role in their establishment. It was very much, to invoke the phrase he so often uses in his rampages, due to concerns with “national security.”
The purpose of the post-war measures was to prevent the return to the conditions that had prevailed in the period between the wars, grounded not least on the understanding that this would lead to revolutionary struggles by the working class in the major capitalist countries, including in the US, which had seen enormous eruptions of class battles in the latter years of the 1930s.
The post-war economic order rested on three pillars—the establishment of the US dollar, backed by gold as the international currency, the reduction of tariffs and promotion of free trade to prevent the emergence of the trade and currency wars that had proved so disastrous in the 1930s, and the reconstruction of war-torn Europe under the Marshall Plan. All three were based on the strength and industrial power of the US economy.
Contrary to the claims of various bourgeois economists and not a few self-styled Marxists that the post-war economic capitalism boom which followed had refuted the Marxist analysis of the historically inevitable economic breakdown of the capitalist system, the post-war framework did not overcome its fundamental contradictions—above all, that between the world market and its division into rival nation-states and great powers.
And within the space of 25 years—a short period of time from the standpoint of history—these contradictions emerged. On August 15, 1971, President Nixon, in the face of a growing balance on trade and balance of payments deficit in the US, removed the gold backing from the US dollar—unilaterally abrogating the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944.
It was a sign that the power of American capitalism, the basis of the post-war order, was starting to markedly weaken.
The scrapping of the Bretton Woods system ushered in a new global financial system. In the 1950s and 1960s, currencies had exchanged at fixed rates. Maintenance of those fixed rates and the prevention of currency wars required that finance and investment flows were subject to tight regulation.
But with the ending of the dollar-gold connection, currencies started to float freely, which meant that capital and financial controls had to be increasingly scrapped. A new international economic order developed based on credit creation and the free flow of money around the world.
The US dollar continued to function as the basis of the international financial system, but it underwent a major transformation. It was now a fiat currency, no longer backed by gold, that is, real value, but solely by the American state. A new global monetary order emerged.
As the FT article noted: “Despite Nixon’s severing the dollar’s link to gold in 1971, the greenback has remained at the center of the monetary universe. In fact, thanks to the dollar’s importance in the expanding and increasingly interconnected global financial system, its importance has only grown. Far from eroding the dollar’s importance, the Nixon shock entrenched it in many ways.”
The freeing of the dollar from the restrictions due to its being tied to gold and the concomitant government regulations aimed at maintaining a fixed exchange system unleashed finance from the constraints imposed on it under the previous regime, opening up vast new avenues for profit accumulation.
Increasingly, above all in the US economy, this gave rise to what has been called financialization, the accumulation of profit via speculative and parasitic methods.
The more these methods developed, the more regulations on finance capital introduced in response to the crisis of the 1930s were scrapped, culminating in the repeal of the last remaining piece of Depression-era legislation, the Glass-Steagall Act, by the Clinton administration in 1999.
In 1991, the liquidation of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy, coupled with the restoration of capitalism in China and the junking of national development policies by the bourgeois national regimes in the former colonies, opened up new profit opportunities through the globalization of production.
Eager to grasp them, the US called for the entry of China into the new world order. The Clinton administration pushed for its admission to the World Trade Organization, which was subsequently ratified by the US under the presidency of George W. Bush.
The US saw the cheaper labor of China as a profit gold mine and that within the new order, China would remain subordinate to it. But the capitalist economy has its own relentless logic, which operates behind the back of imperialist leaders, no matter how powerful.
The Chinese capitalist oligarchy, now confronted with the transformation of the country from a nation of peasants to one with hundreds of millions of workers, as well as an aspiring middle class, recognized it had to move up the value chain.
It could not simply function as the supplier of cheap consumer goods but had to expand production into more sophisticated commodities based on advanced technology if it was to sustain economic growth and maintain what it called “social stability.”
However, this development has posed an existential challenge to US hegemony. This was recognized by the Obama administration in 2011 when it launched its pivot to Asia. His trade representative Michael Froman wrote an article in Foreign Affairs in 2014 recognizing the weakened position of the US and that the global trading system had to be “revitalized” to allow it to play the leading role.
Such efforts, however, came to naught as the balance of trade and payments continued to widen. And the US government debt has continued to escalate at what is acknowledged as an “unsustainable” rate.
The US has only been able to continue on the debt path because of the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency. So long as investors, domestic and international, as well as other governments, kept money flowing into the debt market, the US imperialist state, with its vast military spending, has been able to continue to function.
Back in 2023, CNN and News commentator Fareed Zakaria set out this relationship.
“America’s politicians have gotten used to spending seemingly without any concerns about deficits—public debt has risen almost fivefold from roughly $6.5 trillion 20 years ago to $31.5 trillion today. The Fed has solved a series of financial crashes by massively expanding its balance sheet twelvefold, from around $730 billion 20 years ago to about $8.7 trillion today. All of this only works because of the dollar’s unique status. If that wanes, America will face a reckoning like none before.”
In the face of this crisis the view is being advanced in some circles that whatever the dollar’s travails, it will continue to operate as the world currency.
The FT article on the dollar crisis cites the remarks of Mark Sobel, a former Treasury official and now US chair of OMFIF, a financial think tank.
“The dollar’s dominance will remain in place for the foreseeable future because there are no viable alternatives,” he said. “I question whether Europe can get its act together, and China is not opening its capital account soon. So what’s the alternative? There just isn’t one.”
Sobel’s assertions about the inability of Europe and China to provide as alternative to the dollar are no doubt true.
But his analysis is incomplete because it is based on a faulty logic which ignores the lessons of historical experience. It rests on the assumption that since global trade and finance requires an international currency, the dollar must therefore continue to play that role because there is nothing to replace it.
However, the logic of the present situation is neither that the dollar’s role can continue nor that another national currency will replace it. Rather, it is that the world economy will increasingly fracture into rival trading, financial and currency blocs—a conflict of each against all—as it did between the two world wars with all the disastrous consequences that produced.
For all their irrationality and outright madness there is a logic to Trump’s policies. Every statement and executive order he imposes is justified on the basis of national security—that the present economic order has undermined the military capacity of the United States to fight wars, and this must be rectified at all costs.
The crisis of the dollar therefore signifies that the conditions for a new world war are rapidly developing in which for the US, China—the existential threat to its hegemony—is the chief target.
With tariffs set at 145 percent, and still more hikes to come, and restrictions imposed on the export of high-tech goods to China, the US has imposed a virtual economic blockade against Beijing. How long before that leads to outright military conflict? History suggests sooner rather than later.
The ruling classes in the US and internationally have no solution to the crisis of the capitalist system over which they preside. Everywhere their response to the breakdown is economic warfare, increased military spending and the evisceration of democratic rights through the imposition of fascist and authoritarian regimes.
The international working class is the sole social force which has the capacity to resolve the historic crisis of the capitalist system, exemplified so sharply in the crisis of the dollar, in a progressive manner. But for that power to be actualised it must take up and fight for the perspective of socialist revolution.
This article was originally published in the World Socialist Web Site on 18 April 2025 Here
On March 12, Sri Lanka’s National People’s Power (NPP) government tabled the long-buried Batalanda Commission report in Parliament, fixing dates for a parliamentary debate. This sudden move—decades after the report was first compiled—has nothing to do with securing justice for the thousands of youth and workers who were abducted, tortured, and murdered during the late 1980s. Rather, it is a cynical maneuver by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)-led administration, aimed at deflecting attention from the ongoing economic crisis and reinforcing the credibility of the Sri Lankan state, which bears direct responsibility for the atrocities.
The Batalanda torture chambers and the mass graves scattered across Sri Lanka are grim symbols of the bloody terror unleashed by the ruling class in response to the social unrest caused by the economic collapse of the 1980s. Thousands of youth, primarily from impoverished rural backgrounds, were abducted by the police, the army and the death squads, held in state-run camps, tortured, raped, killed, burned alive on tyre-pyres, or their bodies were thrown to rivers or buried in unmarked graves. The military and police officers invaded the houses of the male victims, raped their wives, mothers and sisters. These were not just isolated crimes but a systematic class war waged against the poor by a ruling elite determined to defend the bourgeois state, capitalist economic reforms and power at any cost.
IMF Austerity and the Social Crisis of the 1980s
The second JVP insurrection (1987–89) did not emerge in a vacuum. The economic devastation of the 1980s, caused by the United National Party (UNP) government’s brutal implementation of IMF-dictated austerity – rural poverty, indebtedness, disease, malnutrition, land grabbing, unemployment, privatization, inflation – created conditions in which insurgent situation grew among the rural disillusioned youth.
In 1977, the government of J.R. Jayawardene abandoned Sri Lanka’s limited welfare-state model and embraced open-market liberalization. The IMF and World Bank demanded “belt-tightening” measures: currency devaluation, drastic cuts to social spending, and the elimination of subsidies for essential goods. The consequences were catastrophic:
By 1988, the overall budget deficit had soared to 12% of GDP.
Foreign debt quadrupled, forcing the government into commercial borrowing.
Inflation reached 14% in 1988.
Official reserves collapsed, falling to six weeks at the end of 1988 and just three weeks of imports by mid-1989.
By 1987-88 unemployment reached 15.5%, I.e. 940,000 unemployed, and 75% of them were in the 15-29 age group, according to official surveys.
J.R.Jayawardene and Ranil Wickremasinghe (r)
Significantly, military expenditure was also increased for the civil war against the Tamil population in the North and East, the total accumulated cost of which up to 1996 since 1983 was at least Rs. 1,135 billion at 1996 prices (168.5% of the 1996 GDP, equivalent to US$ 20.6 billion).
The young men and women who had been promised economic prosperity under Jayawardene’s “open economy” found themselves jobless and trapped in deepening poverty. With traditional avenues for dissent crushed—particularly after the crushing of the July 1980 general strike— JVP capitalized youth resentment for recruitment.
JVP’s Treachery
Founded on a reactionary mixture of Maoism, Castroism and petty-bourgeois radicalism, sequel to the “great betrayal” of Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in 1964, JVP channeled youth discontent over the social crisis, along the line of Sinhala chauvinism, nationalism and to tactics of fascism, in defence of the capitalist state. It exploited the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of July 1987 between Jayawardena and Rajiv Gandhi to wage a chauvinist campaign to recruit cadres.
JVP was never a Marxist party, and ruled out independent mobilization of the working class for the perspective of socialist internationalism against capitalist rule, counterposing the rural youth against the working class. Its hostility to the working class was manifested in its killings of workers, political opponents of the left and those who opposed it ideologically.
This fascist conduct of the JVP marked a high point in the degeneration of the petty-bourgeois nationalist movements throughout the world under conditions of the global crisis of imperialism.
State Terror
In response to the fascist attacks by JVP and its military wing, Patriotic People’s Movement (DJV), the UNP unleashed unspeakable brutality against rural and urban youth and the poor. Jayawardene and his successor, Ranasinghe Premadasa, oversaw a state-sponsored reign of terror against not only JVP cadres but also thousands of working-class youth who had no connection to the insurrection.
Ranasinghe Premadasa (Right) and his Son Sajith Premadasa, now the Leader of the Opposition, who boasts of his father’s “spine”
Torture Camps and Killings: Secret interrogation centers were established across the country, with Batalanda and Eliyakanda emerging as the most notorious. Unspeakable torture methods were employed – those who were abducted were hanged, beaten, barb wires were forced into their rectums, and they were forced into barrels of chili-powder-mixed water, many never emerging alive. Youth were often subjected to rape, decapitation, nails hammered into their heads and into ears, eyes removed and burnt alive on tyre-pyres etc.
Death Squads and Tyre-Pyres: The military, police, and paramilitary gangs abducted suspected “subversives,” who were then executed and burned in public. Sometimes, their families were forced to witness. Many innocent villagers were massacred, kids stabbed, and women raped, just because someone of their family members was a suspected JVP cadre.
Mass Graves: Thousands of bodies were dumped in shallow, unmarked graves, many of which remain undiscovered (Matale, Sooriyakanda, Wilpita are among the few such identified).
Witnesses and victims’ families have provided horrifying testimonies of the pogrom. Survivors recount hearing the screams of detainees through the night. Mothers were told their sons had “disappeared,” only for their burned bodies to be found days later by the roadside.
theSocialist.LK talked to a bereaved woman in the Mulkirigala electorate, whose entire family was massacred by the army in late August 1989, because the army could not locate her only brother. Time has hardly permitted her recovery from the trauma. She told as follows:
“My seven year old daughter (Niranjala), my three young sisters (Nilmini, Sujithaseeli, Mathangalatha), my cousin sister Chandraleka, my mother (Sisiliyana -53) and my father (Edwin-63), all were massacred by the Sinha regiment forces of Katuwana army camp, in that thick of the night. Those devils had bombed our house and, the following day, my husband witnessed the burning flesh under the rubble. We have been told that my sisters were carried away, raped for three days by the soldiers and killed. Beliatta police had later killed and burned my brother (Chulananda -21) too.”
Katuwana Massacre victims: From top Left: Mathangalatha, Nilmini, Sisiliyana, Edwin(a traditional ayurvedic doctor), Sujithaseeli.
From bottom Left: Niranjala, Chandraleka, Chulananda.
A survivor of government repression told our reporters as follows:
“I was then 16. I was somehow able to secure my life. One night in mid 1989, Wanduramba Police in Galle abducted the boyfriend of my cousin, Udayakantha, a tuition teacher, said to be on the orders of Udugampola, who was referred to by the villagers as the “Butcher”. One day after, I saw his burning body on a tire by the roadside, among other bodies.”
Over 100,000 people, mostly youth, were massacred by the government during the period. Millions were rendered destitute. To this day, not a single high-ranking official or politician has been held accountable for any of these crimes.
The JVP’s Complicity in Covering Up the Crimes
Despite having been the primary target and immediate cause of this repression, the JVP has no intention of persuing justice to the families of those murdered. It did nothing to expose these crimes when it previously aligned itself with bourgeois coalition governments, nor will it act now. Like its predecessors, past atrocities will only be capitalized by the government to suppress political opposition, whenever need arises.
Since the 1990s, the JVP has transformed into a right-wing bourgeois party, repeatedly aligning itself with the same capitalist forces that once massacred its youth cadres.
In 2004, the JVP joined a coalition government with Chandrika Kumaratunga, providing political cover for the continuation of state violence, and suppression of the dark record of the ruling class.
It later supported Mahinda Rajapaksa’s regime, which carried out the genocidal slaughter of Tamil civilians during the final phase of the Sri Lankan government’s racist war against Tamils in 2009.
In 2010 and 2015 JVP stood on one platform with Ranil Wickremasinghe and general Sarath Fonseka to consolidate the hand of the oppressor – Wickremasinghe was a cabinet Minister in the Premadasa government, who has been implicated in the Batalanda Commission Report and believed to have overseen the torture, and the latter is the former army commander who supervised killings both in the South and North.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake, then a Parliamentarian and now the President of Sri Lanka, being sworn in as Minister of Agriculture, Land and Irrigation by President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (r) at the Presidential House in Colombo in April 2004 [Photo Credit: M A Pishpa Kumara/EPA/Shutterstock]
Now, as the leading force in the NPP government, the JVP is once again engaged in a political charade. By revisiting Batalanda in Parliament, it seeks to posture as a defender of democracy while positioning to suppress working-class struggles against the IMF’s new round of austerity measures.
The Class Nature of the Crimes and the Path to Justice
The atrocities committed at Batalanda and across Sri Lanka were the calculated acts of a capitalist state defending itself against the threat of mass working-class resistance. Every ruling class party, from the UNP to the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) to the JVP, has participated in suppressing the working class. In the 1971 youth uprising, SLFP-LSSP-CP (CP – Communist Party) coalition government killed about 20000 rural youth to defend the capitalist rule, followed by a series of subsidy cuts and austerity.
Real justice will not come from parliamentary debates, charades of commissions or through bourgeois “administration of justice”. Justice for the victims of state terror requires the fulfillment of all of the following demands:
Disclose the names of all those who were abducted, forcibly disappeared and/or tortured and/or killed by the government security forces, the police and state sponsored paramilitary death squads,
Disclose all the police and military records in respect of the places where police stations, army camps and detention centers were located during the period,
Disclose the names of the officers in charge of the police stations, and the names, ranks and regiments of the commanding officers who were in charge of the army camps, located islandwide during the insurgency.
Locate every Mass Grave in all parts of the island, exhume the remains, conduct forensic analysis to identify the victims and disclose to their relatives,
Disclose to the relatives of the victims what happened to their loved ones, and fully compensate them.
Identify, prosecute and punish the perpetrators, including those who provided political cover.
The realization of these demands requires direct political power to the hands of the working class. The ruling class—regardless of which party holds office, including NPP—will never willingly prosecute its own agents. The fight for truth and justice must be connected to the broader struggle against capitalism and the hegemony of financial capital to overthrow capitalist State and dismantle its military-police apparatus.
The Socialist Perspective
The lessons of 1988-90 are clear: the imperialist system survives through the ruthless suppression of working-class struggles. The pogrom effected on the Sinhala youth of the South, the genocide of the Tamils in the North and the East, the ethnic-cleansing of the Palestinians, the loss of millions of lives to COVID-19 pandemic are seen by the ruling class as necessary costs.
Sri Lanka once again faces economic collapse, and the IMF’s latest demands for austerity will provoke new social explosions. The NPP government, following its predecessors, will respond to mass opposition with state repression. The only way to prevent a repeat of past atrocities is for the working class to take independent political action, break away from all factions of the ruling class, and fight for socialist revolution, with the support of the international working class against the hegemony of the finance capital and their domestic lackeys. This needs revolutionary leadership – the second and the most important lesson.
The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka calls upon workers, rallying behind them the oppressed youth of the North and the South, to reject the false promises of the JVP-led NPP, and to organize independently in committees of industrial action in line with the international socialist program that will end the rule of the capitalist elite and establish a workers’ government of Sri Lanka and Eelam. They should not trust the pseudo-left and the trade unions, who pose as defenders of mass interests while setting political traps against them by proposing an alternative capitalist state. There is no such thing. Only through socialist revolution can the crimes of the past be truly redressed and a future free from oppression and exploitation be secured.
