• The class-based roots of crimes against the poor and the working class of SL

On 12 March of this year, the National People’s Power (NPP) Government tabled the long-buried Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Establishment and Maintenance of Places of Unlawful Detention and Torture Chambers at the Batalanda Housing Scheme in the 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 youths and workers who were abducted, tortured, and murdered during the late 1980s. 

There are reports of 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.

These are crimes of a systematic class war waged against the poor and the working class 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 Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrection (1987-1989) was rooted in explosive objective conditions. The economic devastation of the 1980s, caused by the United National Party (UNP) Government’s brutal implementation of International Monetary Fund (IMF)-dictated austerity – rural poverty, indebtedness, disease, malnutrition, land grabbing, unemployment, privatisation, and inflation – created conditions in which an insurgent situation grew among the disillusioned rural youth. 

In 1977, the Government of then-Prime Minister J.R. Jayewardene abandoned Sri Lanka’s limited welfare-State model and embraced open-market liberalisation. The IMF and the World Bank demanded ‘belt-tightening’ measures: Currency devaluation, drastic cuts to social spending, and the elimination of subsidies for essential goods. The social consequences were catastrophic.

Significantly, military expenditure was also drastically increased for the war in the North and the East. 

The young men and women who had been promised economic prosperity under Jayewardene’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 — the JVP capitalised on youth resentment for recruitment. 

The JVP’s treachery

Founded on a reactionary mixture of Maoism, Castroism and petty-bourgeois radicalism, sequel to the ‘great betrayal’ of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in 1964, the JVP channeled youth discontent over the social crisis, along the lines 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 Jayewardene and then-Indian Premier Rajiv Gandhi to wage a chauvinist campaign to recruit cadres. 

The JVP was never a Marxist Party, and ruled out the independent mobilisation of the working class for the perspective of socialist internationalism against capitalist rule, counter-posing 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 the JVP and its military wing, the Patriotic People’s Movement, the UNP unleashed unspeakable brutality against rural and urban youth and the poor. Jayewardene and his successor, President 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.

Thousands of youth, primarily from impoverished rural backgrounds, were abducted by groups allegedly linked to law enforcement authorities, including those of the security forces. The abducted youth were held in State-run camps, tortured, raped, killed, and burned alive on ‘tire-pyres’, their severed heads displayed on poles, or their bodies thrown to rivers or buried in unmarked graves. The security forces and law enforcement authorities invaded the houses of the male victims or suspected JVP cadres and raped their wives, mothers and sisters. 

Torture camps

Secret detention centres were established across the country, with Batalanda and Eliyakanda emerging as the most notorious. There are reports of unspeakable torture methods that were employed – those who were abducted were hanged and beaten, they had been forced into barrels of chillie-powder-mixed water, many never emerging alive. Youth were often subjected to rape, decapitation, mutilation, nails hammered into their heads, eyes removed and burnt alive, with these crimes well documented.

Death squads reportedly linked to the security forces, the law enforcement authorities, and paramilitary gangs abducted suspected ’subversives’ who were then executed and burnt in public on tyre-pyres. Sometimes, their families were forced to witness it.

Mass graves

Thousands of bodies were allegedly dumped in shallow, unmarked graves, many of which remain undiscovered (Matale, Sooriyakanda, and Wilpita are among the few such identified). Witnesses and victims’ families have provided horrifying testimonies of the pogrom. Survivors recount torture and hearing the screams of detainees through the night. Mothers were told that their sons had ‘disappeared’, only for their burned bodies to be found days later by the roadside. 

This writer spoke to a bereaved woman in the Mulkirigala electorate, whose entire family was massacred by the security forces in late August 1989, because the security forces could not locate her only brother. She alleges that the UNP politicians of the area were complicit in the massacre. 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 – a traditional Ayurvedic doctor), all were massacred by the security forces, 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 security forces and killed. The law enforcement authorities had later killed and burned my brother (Chulananda, 21) too.”

Over 100,000 people, mostly youths, were massacred 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 pursuing justice for the families of those murdered. It did nothing to expose these crimes when it previously aligned itself with bourgeois coalition governments.

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 President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. It supported President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s regime, which carried out the final phase of the Government’s war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in 2009. 

In 2010 and 2015, the JVP stood on the same platform with UNP Leader Ranil Wickremesinghe and former Army Commander, then-retired General Sarath Fonseka to consolidate the hand of the oppressor. Wickremesinghe was a Cabinet Minister in the Premadasa Government who has been implicated in the Batalanda Report and believed to have overseen the torture. The latter was the former Army Commander who supervised the security forces both in the South and the North. 

Now, as the leading force in the NPP Government, the JVP is once again engaged in a political charade. By cynically revisiting Batalanda in the Parliament, it seeks to posture as a defender of democracy while positioning to suppress the working-class. Like its predecessors, past atrocities will only be capitalised by the Government to suppress political dissent, whenever the need arises. 

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, the Government was a SLFP-LSSP-Communist Party coalition Government. During this period, about 20,000 rural youth are alleged to have been killed to defend the capitalist rule, followed by a series of subsidy cuts and austerity measures. 

Real justice will not come from Parliamentary debates, charades of commissions or through the 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, tortured and/or killed by the death squads; disclose all the Police and military records in respect of the places where Police stations, Army camps and detention centres 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; and Identify, prosecute and punish the perpetrators, including those who provided political cover.

The realisation of these demands requires putting direct political power into the hands of the working people. The ruling class, regardless of which party holds office, including the NPP, will never willingly prosecute its own agents, who once defended the bourgeois State. 

 (The writer is an attorney)

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication