Lanka Criminal Justice Commission sentenced Rohana Wijeweera to life imprisonment and twentyone other militants of the Jonatha Vimukthi Perafendan, we couried are am, have disappeared, probably murdered in 1971, were not brought to trial. The most important political trial in contemporary Ceylonese history thus ended with extremely heavy sentences. It had begun more than two years ago, in June 1972. The forty-one defendants were accused of having conspired to "make war against the Queen" (the reference is to Elizabeth Il of Britain!) and to "overthrow the Goverment of Ceylon by force." Among these defendants, fourteen were accused of having "made war against the Queen between April 4, 1971, and June 1, 1971"; the others were accused of complicity in the "unfolding of this war." In its own way, in terms sufficiently hazy that the most complete arbitrariness might be in order at the 26
SENTENCED TO fime of the verdict, the Ceylonese justice system listed in the indictment a series of political events that deserved to be recailed. In June 1970, after winning the elections, the "United Front" came to power. This United Front was composed of the Sri Lanka Freedom party (SLFP), the bourgeois party led by Sirimavo Bandaranaike; the pro-Moscow Communist party; and the Lanka Sama Samaja party (Ceylon Equal Society party), which took to class collaboration in 1964 and was then expelled from the Fourth International. On May 12, 1970, during the electoral campaign, a certain Rohang Wijeweera had been arrested. The whole island was immediately covered with hand-painted posters demanding his release and at the same time revealing the existence of the JVP. In fact, until that time, the new organization, which had been formed at the beginning of 1966 by a nucleus of militants coming out of the pro-Peking CP (Wijeweera, Sanath Karunaratne, and Loku Athula) had neither name nor public presence.
This initial nucleus had first worked on delimiting its political bases by analyzing five main points: the crisis of the Ceylonese economy; the neocolonialism practiced by British imperialism; Indian expansionism in the subcontinent; the bankruptcy of the reformist parties; and the road to be taken by the Ceylonese revolution. On this last point the founders of the organization affirmed the necessity of violently overthrowing the bourgeois state apparatus and of building a revolutionary party. Moreover, under the influence of the Cuban revolution and the writings of Che Guevara, they came to reject the Maoist schema of "people's democratic revolution" and to develop the idea that only the socialist revolution led by the proletariat could carry out the unfinished tasks of the bourgeois revolution, namely, achieving national independence and agrarian reform. Starting at the end of 1967, a program of training schools dealing with these five themes were set up and recruitment began on that basis. The JVP then began to experience a spectacular development. By 1970 it already had several thousand members. The social crisis in the countryside was deep, and the movement recruited mainly among Sinhala youth of rural origin who were often unemployed. Further, at the same time the VP's audience in the universities was already large. This, for the first time in the political history of the country, there appeared a revolutionary organization having, opart from its programmatic qual¡fies, a real influence among the poor peasantry traditionally dominated by Buddhism and under the electoral sway of the SLFP. Moreover, the JVP had the foresight to fill in the gap that usually appears in mass parties in the colonial countries between a leadership composed of brilliant intellectuals educated at Oxford and imbued with Western cultufe on the one hand and the mass of underpoliticized militants attached to other cultural traditions on the other hand. The movement was thus capable of speaking to the rural mosses in a language they could understand and even of awakening within them a long-sleeping national consciousness. An alarmist campaign in the press had already begun when Wijeweera was first arrested. According to reports originating with the police, the extremists of the "Che Guevara movement" (that is what they called the JVP) were supposedly going to try to prevent the holding of elections "by committing acts of violence." In reality, this was simply an electoral maneuver, a blackmail of chaos on the part of the United National party (UNP), the openly pro-imperialist party that had been in power up to that time.
The fact was that the JVP, foreseeing a United Front victory, feared that the UNP would refuse to cede power and would carry out a coup with the aid of the most reactionary wing of the army. It therefore axised its campaign on the necessity of the workers' preparing for struggle against a military dictatorship and in that context called for support to the United Front against the UNP. The victory of the United Front in the elections did not result in Wijeweera's release from prison. He stayed there until July 9, 1970, and was freed without having been informed of any charges against him. A new slander campaign against the JVP had already begun. It was accused - especially in the press of the reformist parties (the CP and the LSSP), which were threatened by the development of the VP - of being pro-UNP, pro-imperialist, and guided from top to bottom by agents of the CIA. The SLFP, also threatened in its electoral bastion, the Sinhala peasantry, did not remain passive. Many militants of the movement were arrested beginning in August 1970. In order to defend itself and explain its positions, the JP then undertook publication of a newspaper, Janatha Vimukthi (Peoples Liberation), whose circulation soon rose to 40,000 copies; a big campaign of public meetings was also launched. During a period of two months in most of the important towns of the country crowds of 15,000-25,000 people, mostly youth, attended meetings that often lasted six hours to listen to the arguments of Wijeweera and his comrades. The parties in power had frequently been incapable of assembling such crowds. The police soon began doing everything they could to hinder the propaganda campaign of the movement. During 1970 a total of more than 500 militants were arrested and then released after identity checks without ever being brought to trial. A leader of the Communist party declared at a meeting that the repression of the JP should not be left to the police. As for the leaders of the LSSP, they instructed their members to engage in physical attacks against members of the JVP. But the JVP continued to grow just as quickly, especially in the cities where its base had been weak up to that time, and it even began to acquire a small influence in the trode-union movement. Nevertheless, the organization was still weak. It had no solid organizational structure. In particular, apart from district leaders, the leadership was composed solely of the nucleus that hod founded the movement. In January 1971 a discussion was initiated aimed at holding a national conference and electing a central committee. But serious differences arose within the leadership. Moreover, the JVP, based essentially among the Sinhalese semiprole-
27
SRI LANKA tariat of the rural areas and among the students, was isolated from two essential sectors of the Ceylonese revolution: the Tamil workers, brought to the island in massive numbers from the south of India by British imperialism in the nineteenth century to work on the tea plantations; and the urban proletariat, numerically weak but commanding glorious traditions of struggle. For a long fime the JP overestimated the political backwardness and attachment to the expansionism of their mother country among the Tamil workers. In the case of the urban proletariat, the JVP of first overestimoted the grip of the reformist leaders of the CP and the LSSP, before beginning to engage in united-front actions with the Ceylon Mercantile Union. The Bandaranaike government, conscious of the inadequacy of the repressive measures taken previously and desiring to exploit the weakness of the JVP as quickly as possible, then decided to move to the offensive and liquidate the movement. On February 27, 1971, during his last public meeting, Wijeweera denounced this plan. He explained that the government felt threatened because of its inability to fulfill its demagogic electoral promises. As far as he was concerned, while the JVP was not a conspiratorial movement, it would nevertheless not allow itself to be eliminated without defending itself. But the political differences and personal clashes in the central nuc leus of the movement had already attained such a degree that no leadership was functioning. On March 1, 1971, a former police officer was named minister of national defense; his sole responsibility was "national security. " The three branches of the armed forces and the police were placed on a state of alert to deal with "threats of violence by subversive elements. " On March 6 the American embassy was attacked by a group called the Moo Youth Group, a completely unknown organization. The government used this crude provocation as an excuse for arresting Wijeweera again (on March 13). Three days later a state of emergency was decreed. Between March 16 and April 5, 1971, more than 4,000 people were arrested by the police and the army, who by virtue of the emergency laws could arrest any individual without warrant, place anyone in prison without trial, and dispose of people collected in any manner they chose, including execution. Following this terror campaign, the JVP was completely disorganized. Its militants nevertheless tried to pass to the counteroffensive. On April 5, 1971, about a dozen police stations were attacked. In most cases, the assailanis had only Molotov cocktails and hand-made bombs. The rare police stations that fell into their hands were soon retoken. The 28 government called for foreign aid to reestablish "order. " One of the broadest counterrevolutionary alliances of contemporary history was then formed. Arms came in not only from Britain and the United States, but also from india and Pakistan, which were at the time making war preparations against each other, and even from Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and China. In the course of the alleged "insurrection" a total of 37 policemen and 19 soldiers were killed. On the other hand, more than 10,000 people were killed or disappeared among the militants and sympathizers of the JVP and, beyond the JVP, among all those who were arrested on the basis of simple denunciation. The police carried out many summary executions, and for several weeks bodies floated down the rivers of the country. More than 18,000 people were thrown into overcrowded prisons and improvised concentration camps. The JVP was liquidated. On May 5, 1971, Minister of Justice Felix Dias Bandaranaike magnanimously announced that all those detained on account of the "insurrection" would be freed if they were innocent, would be brought to "appropriate trial and rehabilitation" if they were "moderately guilty, " and would be "judged according to the laws in force" if they were "seriously guilty." Several thousand prisoners were in fact released during the following year. But the press was forbidden to mention the activities of the police without prior authorization, and access to the prisons was denied even to members of parliament. The police officers of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID), already sadly notorious in the coun try, were thus left to operate at will. Torture, death threats, and threats to imprison family members were commonly used in extracting confessions from suspects. Wijeweera himself was held in the most complete isolation for several months and tortured for an entire week in August 1971. Some of the imprisoned militants, demoralized by the defeat and the bloody repression, cracked and gave confessions. A year after these events, more than 14,000 suspects remained imprisoned without having been tried. With the aim of getting rid of this embarrassing burden, Felix Bandaranaike got parliament to vote a law creating the Criminal Justice Commission. According to this law, ordinary trial proceedings became inapplicable in cases of "offenses" linked to a rebellion, insurrection, or "generalized attack against law and order, "or in cases of "total or partial destruction of factories or other public or private installations. " All the cases were then handed over to the Criminal Justice Commission, composed of Supreme Court judges and holding the powers of both investigation and judgment. The law explained that this Commission could adopt
whatever procedure it deemed "best adapted to the search for the truth. " It permitted testimony to be presented in writing, orally, or gathered by "anybody under any circumstances. " In particular, confessions obtained "under pressure" could be utilized as evidence against a defendant and also against any person named by a defendant, even if the confession were later retracted. Moreover, this Commission pronounces definitive verdicts that cannot be appealed, but those who are acquitted and those who are convicted but have already served their terms are freed only if the secretariat of the Ministry of Justice decides to order their release. Finally, the president of the Commission has full power to limit the presence of the press and public in the trial room and to decide on closed-door hearings. In June 1972, after having read the reports compiled by the three branches of the armed forces and the police, the CJC opened its first inquiry against Forty-one suspects, among them Wijeweera and the main leaders of the JVP. Most of the defendants refused to plead guilty. Only four agreed to do so and thus became the first witnesses for the prosecution. Among the four were Loku Athula and Karunaratne, founders of the JVP, and T.D. Silva, who had been in charge of work in the trade unions; they had already opposed Wijeweera within the JP leadership before April 1971. The Commission, which had decided beforehand that it would rule that the "conspirators" had fomented on "insurrection, " concentrated all its attention on two questions that were essential for it: Had Instructions been given to the JVP militants who had been arrested in possession of arms before April 1971 and if so by whom? Was a decision to make an 'Insurrection" made and if so by whom? The CUC reached similar conclusions on these two points: The leadership of the movement, and Wijeweera especially, was responsible. To support this assertion the CJC based itself on the confessions torn from the suspects, on the declarations of some traitors, and on the reports of the police. Most of the defendants demonstrated the complete illegality of the procedure being conducted and the invalidity of confessions that had been torn from them by force. But the essential point for them was to prove that the JVP had never been a movement of conspirators and that it had simply responded in a fragmented manner to the liquidation attempt organized by the government. Toward this aim Wijeweera and Comrade Bala Tampoe, who was Wijeweera's legal counsellor and the lawyer for six other defendants, denounced all the repressive measures taken against the JVP before April 5, 1971, and even before the enactment of the state of emergency. Although none of the statements made by the defendants before the Commission was allowed to filter through in the Ceylonese press, on two occasions (in November 1973 and later during his final deposition) Wijeweera transformed the prisoners' dock into a platform for the defense of the fundamental principles of Marxism; he explained the history and the liquidation of the JVP and reaffirmed his fidelity to the revolutionary road and his confidence in the socialist future of humanity. On July 22, 1974, two years after his first speech before the CJC, Bala Tampoe began his final presentation. His goal was to show that the major charge in the indictment, that of "conspiracy, " had not been established and then to demand that all the defendants be acquitted. Although the trial record ran to more than 10,000 pages of documents, Bala Tampoe was refused the right to take the time that he deemed necessary to develop his presentation. After an argument with the president of the Commission on this point, he was forced to stop. The session was interrupted and Bala Tampoe shortly learned that he would not be allowed to speak again. The following day Wijeweera and several of his comrades raised a strong protest and announced their refusal to attend the sessions of the CJC any more. These sessions ended a short time The Ceylonese bourgeoisie has old accounts to sette with Bala Tampoe. The Ceylon Mercantile Union (CMU), the trade union of which he is general secretary, was alone in the organized workers movement in taking a position against the repressien in April 1971. In October 1972 he organized along with some other unions a one-day hunger strike in defense of political prisoners. Thousands of political prisoners and their families participated in this hunger strike, as did half a million plantation workers and certain sectors of the urban working class. In addition, Bala Tampoe was one of the founders of the Human and Democratic Rights Organization (HADRO), which offered legal assistance to the defendants and their families. But above all, he was one of the most fervent defenders of the militants of the VP before the Criminal Justice Commission. For two years, deliberately reducing his activities as a trade-union leader, he devoted all his efforts to their cause and visited their prisons on a daily basis. In June 1973 the minister of jusfice referred in his own way to these efforts during a speech in parliament. Af that time, 4,500 people remained in prison without having been tried. Felix Dias Bandaranaike then expressed the wish that the CJC utilize the possibility, presented to it by a new law, of handing out suspended sentences to all those who would plead guilty. In any case, he said he did not see how they would ever be finished if these 4,500 prisoners took Bala Tampoe for their
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SRI LANKA lawyer and "wanted to carry out counterinterrogations on all the points. " In December 1974, at the time the verdict was handed down against Wijeweera and his comrades, there were no more than 1,000 political prisoners. The majority of them had refused to plead guilty. The other prisoners, except in some rare cases in which the State Council had asked for severe penalties, had earlier been condemned to two years in prison (suspended) and were released but kept under judicial control. But most of them are politically demoralized, and those who are not must display extreme caution. A broad current of sympathy for the JVP still exists in a diffuse way among the youth, but for the moment this sympathy can find no political expression. The radical currents of the Ceylonese workers movement, especially the CMU, have been able to loosen the vise of the repression. Despite the state of emergency, they have reconquered the rights of assembly and demonstration, which were in lorge part suppressed after April 1971, and they have waged an active campaign in favor of the political prisoners. But they have not been able to hold back the consequences of the defeat: demoralization and apathy run deep among the laboring masses and the youth. Moreover, the campaign of international solidarity in defense of the JVP has not fully received the response it deserves. In spite of the work done in Britain by the Ceylon Solidarity Campaign and in Sweden and Japan, and in spite of the support extended to the campaign by the sections of the Fourth International, the Ceylon bourgeoisie has in large part succeeded in maintaining a blackout over the repression and the trials. It is in this context that the sentences were handed down, the dispensers of justice revealing the most complete arbitrariness and cynicism. The sixth defendant, Loku Athula, "whose confessions were of considerable aid to those conducting the investigation" and who has now renounced the idea of using violence to accomplish the revolution, was sentenced to five years in prison, but will be able to benefit from executive clemency according to the recommendation of the judges. The twelfth defendant, T.D. Silva, "had no confidence in Wijeweera" and it is "improbable that in the future he will engage in revolutionary activities. " He was consequently sentenced to two years in prison suspended. On the other hand, in the cases of the three first suspects (Piyatileke, Lionel Bopage, and Uyangoda), who were all district secretaries of the JVP, the 30 court saw "no reason to be indulgent. " They were thus sentenced to twelve years in prison each. The thirty-first and thirty-ninth defendants (Jayasiri, a trade-union leader, and Wijekulatilleke) "showed no sign of repenting. "They were therefore sentenced to seven and eight years in prison respectively. Finally, for Wijeweera, who was already in prison at the time of the April 1971 events, the only consideration of the verdict was the following: The CJC "sees no alternative to a sentence of life imprisonment." Wijeweera was not surprised. Upon arriving in the courtroom he first shook hands with Bala Tampoe and then, along with his comrades, sang the International. In his final declaration of the trial, he had already told his judges: Whatever your verdict, whether it is for acquittal or imprisonment, 1 am sure that this government will keep me in custody. Even if I have to spend my life in prison, 1 have no regrets. ... I am not ready to ask pardon for crimes that I did not commit. " And he ended by saying: "The minorities in this country are in a worse situation than 1 am. To express my solidarity with their struggle I would like to end my statement with this maxim of the Tamil language: 'Injustice does not always triumph. Justice will triumph in the end."" The Ceylonese bourgeoisie could not permit a verdict of clemency. Unemployment is affecting a quarter of the population. Inflation is galloping. The sham agrarian reform undertaken by the government has not proven copable of furnishing land to the peasants or of increasing the production of foodstuffs. Food has to be imported in ever greater quanfities and the balance of trade is in greater deficit than ever. Famine is spreading among the Tamil workers of the plantations. Discontent runs deep in the working closs after the repeated attacks on its standard of living. The workers have managed to hold several demonstrations in spite of the ban on the right to strike and the threats of firings hanging over their heads. In this critical context, the release in the near future of the best militants of the JVP would represent for the Ceylonese bourgeoisie the inevitable prelude to other developments: *The political and organizational linkup of the most courageous of the elements of this new revolufionary generation coming out of the poor peasantry with the vanguard sections of the working class; *The formation of a powerful revolutionary party capable of combining the radicalization of these two sectors and of making the proletariat of the plantations join in their struggle; * New revolutionary explosions having greater chances than ever before in the country of ending in victory.
The bourgeois regime is attempting to prevent all this at any price. But it is for the realization of these objectives that the revolutionary Marxists must unceasingly work.
•FOR THE IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF WIJEWEERA AND HIS COMRADES!
We have learnt that the Comrades of the Fourth International, at their tenth world congress held in the beginning of this year, have passed a resolution expressing their solidarity with the Janatha
Vimukthi Peramuna (People's Liberation Front) of Sri Lanka and the members of the J.V.P. imprisoned by the Sirima Bandaranaika regime. Furthermore, we came to know through the literature of the Fourth International that the comrades of the Fourth International are engaged in building up a world-wide agitation to compel the capitalist and reactionary rulers of the countries such as Chile, India, Pakistan, Ireland, Sri Lanka, etc., to release all the political prisoners
We think that, at this moment, our revolutionary gratitude should be extended to the Fourth In-
It is essential to mention here the assistance given to us by Comrade Bala Tampoe (the General
Secretary of the Ceylon Mercantile Union and the Revolutionary Marxist Party of Sri Lanka) by defending several comrades before the Criminal Justice Commission.
At a time when we were attacked by the capitalist regime of Sri Lanka supported not only by the
American and British imperialists, but also by the Soviet and Chinese bureaucracies and by the so-called leftists in this country including the ex-Trotskyites of the L.S.S.P. and the various varieties of Stalinism, Comrade Bala came forward to defend the J.V.P. politically and its comrodes legally, although we had political differences. The task performed by Comrade Bala by defending our comrades charged before the C.J.C. and by exposing the brutal repression of the capitalist state and the reactionary nature of the C.J.C. Act, before and outside of the C.J.C., will be remembered by the younger revolutionary generations with revolutionary gratitude.
It is our revolutionary wish to see the complete success of the movement that is being carried out by the Fourth International in order to get all the revolutionaries released who are imprisoned by the rulers whether they are of capitalist countries as in Chile and India or of degenerated bureaucratic countries as in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.
SRI LANKA imprisoned and detained by them, unconditionally.
ternational for its solidarity expressed with us.
Lang live the World Socialist Revolution!
'FOR THE IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS!
FOR THE ABROGATION OF THE STATE OF EMERGENCY!
a