The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in Sri Lanka will hold a public meeting in Colombo on March 23, concluding the party’s six-week campaign for the Western Provincial Council election. The SEP is standing a slate of 43 candidates in the Colombo District.

As the SEP election manifesto emphasises, the party’s campaign advances the only program, based on socialism and internationalism, to fight the growing threat of war in Asia, as well as the Colombo government’s austerity agenda and assault on basic democratic rights. The meeting will further elaborate this program and discuss the urgent task of building an anti-war movement of the international working class based on a socialist perspective.

Sri Lanka is being drawn into the maelstrom of geo-political rivalries produced by US imperialism’s “pivot to Asia” to undermine China. Washington is demanding that President Mahinda Rajapakse’s government distance itself from its close ties with China and toe the US line.

The developments in Ukraine are a further warning of the dangers of war. The Obama administration, in collaboration with the German government, engineered regime-change in Ukraine last month, risking nuclear war in a confrontation with Russia. Seizing on the Crimean vote to join Russia as a pretext, the US and its European Union allies have imposed sanctions on Moscow and are threatening military action.

The entire Colombo political establishment maintains a conspiracy of silence over the imperialist warmongering. Nor do any of the bourgeois parties have any fundamental difference with the government’s far-reaching austerity measures dictated by the International Monetary Fund or its attacks on basic democratic rights.

We urge workers, youths and intellectuals to attend the meeting and participate in this important political discussion.

Venue: New Town Hall, Colombo
Time: Sunday, March 23, 3.00 p.m.