The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in Sri Lanka have called public meetings in Colombo and other locations on the intensifying political conflict within the ruling elite.
President Maithripala Sirisena dissolved the parliament on November 9, two weeks after he sacked Ranil Wickremesinghe as prime minister and replaced him with ex-President Mahinda Rajapakse. Sirisena has openly violated the country’s constitution. Now the political crisis has escalated further with the Supreme Court overturning Sirisena’s shut down of the parliament.
Sirisena’s moves represent the culmination of the protracted decay of parliamentary rule since “independence” in 1948. At the same time, this crisis of capitalist rule has emerged amid deepening global economic problems, rising geo-political tensions between the US and India on one side and China on the other, and the growing struggle of workers and the oppressed masses as part of an international upsurge of the class struggle.
No one should have any illusion that the democratic and social rights of working people will be defended by any of the rival capitalist factions that have ruled the country for more than seven decades, suppressing the basic rights of workers and the oppressed masses, or the other parties of the bourgeois establishment, such as the Tamil National Alliance and Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna.
The working class must reject all these ruling-class factions and their opportunist pseudo-left hangers-on, like the Nava Sama Samaja Party, United Socialist Party and Frontline Socialist Party. They must mobilise independently of all these bourgeois parties and their agents, rallying the rural poor and other oppressed masses in the fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government based on a socialist and internationalist program.
We urge workers, youth and intellectuals and WSWS readers to participate our meetings, which will discuss these vital political issues and the socialist program and perspective needed to respond.
Venues, dates and times:
Sunday, November 18, 3.00 p.m. Post Office Auditorium, Matara
Monday, November 19, 4.00 p.m. N. M. Perera Centre, Cotta Road, Borella, Colombo 08.
Sunday, November 25, 10.00 a.m. CWF Hall, Hatton