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.
Reposted below is the article of the World Socialist Web Site published on 10 September 2025.
Acting as a cultural arm of Canada’s imperialist ruling elite, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) will be rolling out the red carpet Wednesday for the world premiere of a film about the events of October 7, 2023 that provides propaganda cover for Israel’s genocide against the Gaza Palestinians.
The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, from director and producer Barry Avrich, is entirely silent about the Israeli state’s decades of brutal oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people, and the violence and terror it has inflicted on the residents of Gaza and the West Bank over the past two years. The documentary film’s lens is exclusively focused on the efforts of retired Israeli Major General Noam Tibon to rescue family members caught up in the October 7 Gaza Palestinian uprising against the Zionist regime, which for more than 15 years had subjected them to a brutal and ongoing economic blockade.
The film presents Tibon as an heroic figure. While Avrich emphatically—and laughably—claims the film is “non-political,” the not-so-subtly inferred message is that Tibon personifies the “plight” and “courage” of the Israeli people.
The documentary centers on Tibon’s obstacles in reaching his family, who had come under fire during the attack, when Palestinian fighters entered Kibbutz Nahal Oz, which lies less than one kilometer from the Gaza border. Tibon responded to a text from his son and, as the film’s website breathlessly puts it,
With no time to spare, Noam and his wife, Gali, embarked on a ten-hour mission across a country under siege to save their family… Noam navigated ambushes, roadblocks, and a collapsing security system in a relentless race against time.
The film is described in the synopsis given by TIFF as “a profoundly human story about courage, family, and the power of love in the face of unimaginable terror.”
This is foul Zionist propaganda. The constructed and entirely contrived narrative treats the events of October 7 entirely outside of history—as if they fell from the sky. Its narrative frame conforms to a “T” with that of the Israeli state and its western imperialist backers: the Hamas-led uprising was “unprovoked.” Indeed, Avrich submitted his film to TIFF under the title “Out of Nowhere.” It was the festival organizers, clearly in the interests of obscuring the film’s pro-Zionist line, who persuaded him to rename it The Road Between Us.
Anyone who has followed the decades-long persecution of the Palestinians by the Israeli regime can only feel outraged by claims that Israel, which has been armed to the teeth by Washington and its allies, was a “country under siege” in October 2023. Since 2006, Israel had effectively maintained Gaza as an “open-air prison,” repeatedly bombing and terrorizing its population, not to mention the systematic seizures of Palestinian land and episodes of mass ethnic cleansing going back to the very formation of Israel in 1948.
Nor can there be any other legitimate response but hostility to complacent references to “courage” and “family” after almost two years of a non-stop genocidal onslaught by Israel, backed by the imperialist powers, on the Palestinians, whose families have been torn apart, massacred, starved and left destitute. The only “unimaginable terror” is that carried out by the IDF against Gaza’s population.
The attempt by TIFF to wash the blood of the Palestinian people from the IDF by finding a “hero” among its senior ranks could not have served as a better piece of propaganda for the Netanyahu regime if they had paid for it themselves. To tout such a film as a legitimate artwork is as repugnant today as claiming that Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda efforts were a legitimate expression of life during the Third Reich.
There are many issues a serious documentary about October 7 could have taken up, including interrogating the conditions that caused hundreds of Palestinian fighters to embark effectively on a suicide mission, and the reasons for the alleged and thoroughly unconvincing state of “unpreparedness” of the Israeli military and intelligence.
The Zionist state and military boast about their technological capability and skill at every turn when it serves their ideological and political purposes. But world public opinion is supposed to believe they found themselves entirely blind-sided in October 2023.
Extensive evidence suggests that elements high up in the Zionist regime were aware of the Islamist Hamas’ plans for October 7 well in advance, and chose to ensure that Israel’s security forces stood down to create a pretext for a long-planned onslaught on Gaza to ethnically cleanse its population and seize the tiny enclave, to implement, in fact, the “Final Solution” of the Palestinian question. After the uprising began, the IDF invoked the so-called “Hannibal Directive,” which allows the military to kill Israeli civilians rather than let them be taken hostage.
The decision to screen the film at TIFF, which has reserved the 1,800-capacity Roy Thompson Hall for Wednesday’s premiere, has nothing to do with questions of artistic merit. On the contrary, the sordid process by which the film, initially excluded from one of the world’s most important film festivals, became a—if not the—marquee event of TIFF 2025 underscores the central role that financial and Canadian imperialist foreign policy interests play in the festival management’s decisions and those of the country’s other major cultural institutions.
The phony furor over TIFF “censorship”
On August 12, media reports emerged that TIFF had reversed its decision to screen The Road Between Us at this year’s festival, citing legal concerns that some of the footage recovered from captured GoPros by Hamas fighters had not been cleared for use, as well as a “potential threat of significant disruption.”
These reports met with an immediate outcry of protest from the Zionist lobby in Canada, quickly joined and encouraged by the political elite and right-wing press.
On August 13, Toronto City councillors James Pasternak and Brad Bradford issued a joint statement on X, declaring, “TIFF should not be banning or censoring films and should respect the freedoms of the arts community,” and concluding that the decision to cancel was a “moral failure.”
The very next day, TIFF capitulated to this reactionary campaign, now less than 48 hours old, and announced it would ensure the film would be screened during what is the festival’s 50th edition. With The Road Between US’s producers, explained TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey, “We have worked together to find a resolution to satisfy important safety, legal, and programming concerns.”
This quick retreat did next to nothing, however, to appease the film’s ruling class promoters, who in the name of denouncing TIFF censorship, lashed out at the supposed intolerance of anti-Gaza genocide protesters.
The National Post gave feature coverage to an op-ed penned by Sharren Haskel, who self-identifies as Israel’s “Canadian-born” deputy foreign minister. She voiced her outrage that TIFF sought “the ‘approval’ of terrorists,” who carry out “murders, rapes, and kidnappings,” and charged the festival with complicity “in silencing the truth.” She also slammed the Carney government for its empty announcement it would recognize a Palestinian state.
Canada, like the US and the other imperialist powers, is a key supporter of the Gaza genocide. Whether under Mark Carney or Justin Trudeau before him, the Liberal government has backed Israel’s genocidal campaign against Gaza and rampage across the Middle East to the hilt, shipping tens of millions of dollars in weaponry to Israel, while clamping down ruthlessly on anti-genocide protests at home.
Within Canada’s film industry the most prominent public statement of support for the screening of The Road Between US’s came from Susan Reitman Michaels, sister of the late producer/director Ivan Reitman, whose family is a major benefactor of TIFF. The family donated land for the home of the festival, the TIFF Lightbox complex in downtown Toronto.
In an open letter Michaels wrote, “The irony is unbearable. My family’s gift of land to TIFF was intended as a memorial to my parents’ faith in freedom of expression, only to see that very principle eroded… What it looks like, and feels like, is the silencing of a Jewish voice at a time when Jewish voices are already being marginalized.” As intended, the letter elicited a thoroughly stage-managed “torrent of outrage,” with the festival reportedly receiving 60,000 emails objecting to the initial cancellation of the film.
The hypocrisy of Michaels and the other would-be warriors for “free speech” is staggering. None of them batted an eyelid, but on the contrary cheered on the political establishment when it systematically smeared and sought to intimidate hundreds of thousands of Canadians who participated in anti-genocide protests over the past two years. Anti-genocide activists calling for an end to Canadian imperialism’s supply of military equipment to Israel have faced arrest and harassment by the police, and in some cases the loss of their employment. The few voices who raised any criticism of the genocide within the political establishment, like former NDP member of the Ontario legislature Sarah Jama, were politically sidelined and silenced.
Moreover, the claim to be defending rights of “freedom of expression” on the one hand, while invoking the special rights of wealthy benefactors to influence programming decisions, reveals the class character of the objections.
In announcing the festival’s renewed commitment to screen The Road Between Us, TIFF CEO Bailey issued a cowardly mea culpa. “I want to apologize,” he declared, “for any hurt, frustration, or disappointment that our communication about the film has caused, and for any mischaracterizations that have taken root. We’re working now—and we will be for a while—to clarify things and to repair relationships.”
Bailey offered his fawning and, frankly, disgusting reassurance:
I want to be clear: claims that the film was rejected due to censorship are unequivocally false. Both TIFF and the filmmakers have heard the pain and frustration expressed by the public and we want to address this together.
The “pain and frustration” were not expressed by “the public,” but by TIFF’s wealthy donors, the Zionist lobby, and powerful sections of the corporate and political elite—many of them the very same forces who last year demanded that TIFF cancel screenings of a documentary that humanized Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.
It should be remembered that TIFF has a record of celebrating Zionism and Israel. In 2009, eight months after one of the Israeli military’s murderous assaults on Gaza, the film festival decided to honor Tel Aviv as the first city to be the subject of its new program, “City to City.” The decision provoked widespread outrage and protest.
Avrich, a Montreal-based filmmaker, has less than convincingly sought to talk his way out of any political intention behind his decision to make the film. Avrich told an interviewer for Deadline, “This film is not about politics, it’s about humanity, family and sacrifice.”
Avrich and the IDF Major General Tibon used a joint interview with the Globe and Mail, published September 6, as an opportunity to double down on this transparent falsification, presenting their film, in the postmodernist jargon so prominent in artistic and academic circles, as simply one “story” among others. In a remark that reveals at best his indifference towards and more likely support for the greatest crime of the 21st century so far, Avrich blandly told the Globe that he was just “a guy in Canada who is attracted to a great story… I didn’t see anything outside that story.” The same line was taken by Tibon, who adds in the same interview that ”we didn’t say one word of politics.” Anyone who believes a word of this rubbish …
When the Globe interviewer gave them the opportunity, to say something about the plight of the Palestinians and the ongoing genocide, both Avrich and Tibon pointedly refused to do so.
An artist unmoved by genocide and who, in the face of the systematic destruction of an entire people, “didn’t see anything outside” the fate of a senior officer in this machinery of mass murder and his immediate family, deserves only contempt. This is not a matter of artistic freedom. Rather, it reflects a tendency to revel in a kind of cold indifference to mass human suffering cultivated within a privileged layer of the middle class, whose expanding stock portfolios and bank balances are tied up with the eruption of imperialist wars over the past three-and-a-half decades, culminating in the Gaza genocide as part of a rapidly developing third world war.
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.
