CEYLON SPECIAL ISSUE | IMGpapers 1968

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The Red Mole is the fortnightly paper of the International Marxist Group, British section of the Fourth International. We publish this special broadsheet on Ceylon to raise on the British left, and among S.Asian exiles in Britain, the question of the repression in Ceylon, the political problems facing the Ceylonese revolution, and the need for worldwide solidarity with the struggle against the reactionary regime and the rule of imperialism in Ceylon. 16,000 political prisoners are still held in the jails and concentration camps of the Bandaranaike regime. Last March and April the armed forces of the bourgeois state launched a harsh repression against the revolutionary youth led by the JVP, provoking a reaction which was put down with a ferocity intended to intimidate the working class and the rural masses, among whom the revolutionary left was gaining an implantation. Yet it has not proved so easy to deteat the class struggle traditions of the Ceylonese masses, despite the confusion resulting from the continued participation in government of the treacherous leaderships of the CP and LSSP. Over a year after the so-called insurrection, the government has had to bring in a new Constitution and new reactionary laws to formalise the repression, before it could bring the political prisoners to trial. The first 41, including Wijeweera and other alleged leaders of the uprising. are now being tried before the special courts set up under the Criminal Justice Commissions Act, which can accept hearsay evidence and confessions obtained under duress. Under the new Constitution, moreover, there can be no investigation of the acts of the executive by the judiciary.

In such a situation of repression, the demand for fair trials' put forward by the Ceylon Committee, and rejected by the Ceylon Solidarity Campaign, is a mockery. The clear responsibility of the left in Britain is to solidarise with the demands for immediate, unconditional release of all political prisoners, an end to the State of Emergency, and to the new repressive laws.

The LSSP(R) and the Ceylon Mercantile Union have consistently been to the fore of the agitation against the repression