Riding a Tiger into a blind
a liberated Tamil Eelam, the Liberation Tigers of In our last issue (SO. 11), in Tigers the Indian Army leading force - politically and military - in the fight for Tamil Eelam (LTTE) should be supported by socialists internationally, irrespective of differences over their tactics. M. MANICKAM and LAL SILVA take issue Cannot Tame', Finn Jensen argued that as the alley with him below.
LTTE: That is their consistent subordination of Jenven states that in 1976 the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) called forthe restora- Lion und reconstitution of the free, sovereign. tunist bourgeois formation and that in 1977 the TULF made a secret pact with the UNP. In relum for certain concessions and possible of- workers had voted for marxist and working class representalivex to parliament that ycar. IF it were not for the Coylon Tamil repre- sentatives, the first government of Sri Lanka would have been a coalition of working class and eihnic minority representatives led hy the Trotskyist LSSP (literally translated, the 'Equal Jensen's potted history of Tamil resistance leaves nut nne very important feature of almost all Tamil political formations including the the interests of the Tamil people to bourgeois secular, socialist (D) state of Tamil elam" and that the 1977 general election gave a majority in Parliament to the right-wing United Nation- al Party, with the TULF as the leading opposi- tion party, What has been omitted here is that despite their rhetoric, the TULE was an oppor- Page 21 geoisie ganged up against the Tamil plantation workers in 1948 precisely because these independence. The Sinhals and Tamil bour- Sri Lanka union demo against 1965 UNP government Tamil resistance and/ur imperialist interests. Society Party'). across Sri Lanka an a whole - both in the ruling cally, immediately priorto the British conquest, class as well as in the working class - than on a linguistic orethnic basis, in the first decade after apart from cultural, caste, and class differences between these two groups, they live in different aspirations. For Jensen "nation" is an ahistorical post-capitalist phenomenon, with its roots in the ruling class to fulfill basic tasks of the politically incorrect to refer to pre-capitalist The development of a Tamil 'nation" was by was a far greater degree of class solidarity concept: he speaks of wo nations' unified by the so-called Sinhaln Kingdom in Kandy was ruled by Tamil kings and its official language nation in Sri Lanka is a post-imperialist and inability of the post-independence Sn Lankan democratic revolution. It is theoretically and no means a foregone conclusion. In fact there geographical areas and have different national' cally incorrect - if we still accept Lenin's method - to lump together these Iwo separate and distinct communities as one nation. Quite the British, thereby using the tem nation" in- terchangeably with the term 'kingdom". (Ironi- In our opinion, the development of the Tamil For the very same reason it is methodologi- political formations as "nations'. for the UNP candidate. specific demands of plantation workers. fact any attempt to ly in the recent prosidential elec. December, the vast tation workers voted opposed by the LITE as a diver- tions held last and have consistent- ly failed to support their struggles. In campaign on the plantation workers has been sion. Not surprising- majority of the plan the SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 12 February 1989 These are not just historical issues. Even today, the LT TE has no programme for the tea enfranchised the Tamil plantation workers, the overwhelming majority of Ceylon Tamil MPs voted in favour of that draconian act. The marx- ist and liberal MPs (mainly Sinhalese) voted and campaigned against it. Furthermore, up until 1965, Ceylon Tamil politicians regularly This accounts not only for the traditional an- tagonism berwcen the plantation Tamils and Ceylon Tamils, but also for the total lack of sup- port amongst plantation Tamils for the demand for a separate Tamil state, despite the super-ex- ploitation they have suffered for many decades. Central and Uva provinces. Jensen lumps them was introduced in Sri Lanka which forced hundreds of thousands of Tamil labourers to migrate to the Sinhalese south", Jensen gives the impression that a significant proportion of these Tamil plantation workers came from the north and east of Sri Lanka, or Ceylon, as it was then called. This was not the case. All the pluritation workers came from South India and they were regarded as low caste 'untouchables by Ceylon Tamils, who were used as middle management and as supervisory personnel by the British plantation Raj. In 1948 when the first post-in- dependence government formed by the conser- vative United National Party (UNP) dis- and fails to deal with the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and the role of different reproduces uncritically the selective and interpretations which the population of Sri Lanka, But there are sig- nificant caste, class, political and economic dit- ferenceshetween the Tamils in the northem and eastern provinces of Sri Lanka, and the Tamil plantation workers who live mainly in the political and military groups from a Tamil: make up about 21.5 per cent of the And by stating that "A plantation conomy Jensen's analysis contains inaccuracies His article LTTE use, and so Jensen unwittingly Tamils and the Tamil nation foried coalition governments with the UNP. abandons a marxist approach. class perspective. together. "facts'
ness of the LTTE, largely because many people The LTTE policy of alienating all other sec- tions of the oppressed manses in Sri Lanka has driven them more and more into the arms of the Indian and other bourgeoisies. They have fought tooth and nail against any form of eliminate the LTTE at the risk of weakening cal groups to achieve their ends, To this extent Jensen is right - the Indians want to 'tame the Tigers - but not eliminate them. Contrary to LTTE propaganda, the Indian peace kceping LTTE itself wants to do a diplomatic deal with And the Indians do not want to their hargaining power with the Sinhala bour- gecisie; so they are smugly uning all the politi- force has succeeded in limiting the effective- in the north and cast have become war weary. The LTTE'S blind alley al Kittu, an LTTE militant, all these detainees And in January of this year, Annamalai, the Jaffna leader of the Trotskyist NSSP, was shot Organisations such as the Eelam People's hat caste oppression and has sct up grassroots committees of the masses, have been the chief targets for LTTE liquidation campaigns. Like cial delention camps (the most notorious being at Boosa, near Galle), the LTTE also set up their own.version of Boosa. Aficra bomb wasthrown In the Tamil community itself - both nation- killed by the LITE. (A further 260 or so were LTTE members who took cyanide pills when captured by the army, and the remainder were Liberation Front (EPRLE), which aims to com- the Sri Lankan goverment, which set up spe- militants killed by their own organisations.) and killed by LTTE forces. were summarily executed. DEBA tween Tamil masses in the north and east and the oppressed Sinhala workers und peasants, or They would seck the assistance of plantation youth only as foot soldiers in their 'Eelam" fers of ministerial jobs, the TULF delivered a suhstantial portion of the Tamil vote outside the north and east to the UNP. Jensen's article also fails to mention the fact that many of the lead- ing cadres of the LTTE itself were the strong- When UNP repression compelled Tamil youths to take up unus, the leaderships of most armed groups switched their allegiance from the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie to other ruling clas- ses - including the Indian bourgeoisie. There leaderships consciously and deliberately prevented the development of solidarity he- the super-exploited Tamil plantation workers. arm men of the TULF. vuicide squads.
Often petty bourgeois nationalists will brut- dish Lenin's thesis on the national question but abandon another. They draw our attention to eastern province defied LTTE threats and their call to boycott the elections. The LTTE are not *the leading political and military force" in the emphasise one aspect of his thesis and happily ses, opposed moves to challenge class and caste oppression, and sought to maintain their grip by sheer armed might and the physical elimination of all other political currents. They have alienated not only Sinhala toilers and plantation workers, but also a substantial section of the Tamil massee too. In the recent Provincial Council clections a majority of Tamils in the democratic grasspoots organisation of the mas fight for Tamil Eelam, as Jensen claims. The Leninst thesis LTTE claim to be advancing the class struggle. even in the north and cast, is, to say the least, vociferous supporters (at present campaigning for them in Britain), is N. Satyendra, the former Chair of Union Carbide in Sri Lanka. He was a vicious anti-working class record co-operating with the Sri Lankan goverment in 1978 to smash a number of workers" struggles, He is one amongst many in the LTTE pack. The ally and intemationally - the LTTE draws its support largely from the upper layers of society. Internationally their main financial support has come from the late Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu - M.G. Ramachandran and the American Tamil Association. Many Tamil socialists are suspicious of the amount of American Tamil money going to the LTTE. One of LTTE's most Relations with the Indian absurd. sacres - of Sinhala civilians. Small children too, have died at their hands. Just like the Sinhala villagers, LTTE cadres have repeatedly attack- were the same there would he no need for The LTTE (with, lo a lesser extent, the stu- dent organisation BROS), more than any other Eelam group. bave treated not just the Sri dominated anny, but also ordinary Sinhala worker and peasants, as their enemies. They have carried out innumerable attacks - mas- soldiers who indiscriminately aftacked Tamil Marx often said that if appearance and reality science. We need to look further, beyond the rhetoric and hehind the superficial appearance ofLTTE's class character (where Jensen seems Lankan ruling classes and the Sinhala Prettifying the LTTE to stop), to the reality of their politics.
toilers in the oppressor nation, and for a class democracy, socialists enable these workers to overcome this obstacle and create conditions for a unified struggle to overthrow capitalist This involves a dual fight - against chauvinist consciousness of the workers and nise the right of oppressed nations to deçide their own destiny; the right of self deterina However, in the very same thesis, Lenin also no condition should workers" organisations he divided on national or ethnic lines. Furthermore the whole thrust of Lenin's orientation was to assist workers of the oppressed nation, whose socialist conscious- ness had been blocked by national oppression. By intervening in the struggle for full Lenin's insistence that socialists should recog tion, including the right to secede from the op emphasised that on pressor nation. ruie. The LTTE did not always oppose the peace accord. Initially they accepted it and tried to put ment it in a manner that would allow the LTTE to dominate the Provincial Councils. In fact to date, the LTTE hasnotcalled for the withdrawal tainly trained and armed the LTTE better than other groups. In particular the Indians made sue that left wing groups such as the EPRLF The Indius had constant consultations with LTTE leaders. They were the only group con- sulted by the Indian govemment immediately before signing the Indian-Sri Lankan accord. To all the others it war presented as a fait ac- pressure on the Indian goverment to implo- The Indians, as Jensen correctly states, cer- ruling class were not well armed. compli. responsibility: to assist workers to develop a ly to tail-end bourgeois and petty-bourgeois currents in the nationalist movement. Through ces in the Sinhala south that supported the right opposed the militarist and chauvinist policies of Whilst every subjugated nation has a right to determine the tactics and strategy it should adopt in the struggle to free itself, those within that nation must adopt strategies to unify workers and all the oppressed forces against the ruling class. Socialists have an additional socialist consciousness. It is not enough mere- ed Sinhala civilians. Refore the arrival of the In- dian peace keeping Force in 1987, this policy of the LTTE strengthened the hand of the govern- ment and Sinhala chauvinists, It also substan- of self-determination of the Tamil nation and tially weakened the efforts of progressive for- the govemment.
Socialists must implement this approach in its totality and struggle against petty-bourgeois charlatans seeking to steal some of their clothes The LTTE, like many other petty-bourgeois nationalists, have heen quick to adopt those ing and suppressing those that don't. Viewed from this standpoint it looks like the Tigers M. Manickam and Lal Siha programme and aguinst bourgeois and petty- bourgeois currents within the oppressed nation. aspects of Lenin's thesis on the national ques- tion that suit theirclass interests, whilst discard- SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 12 February 1989 to serve their own class needs, have taken Jensen for a ride Jensen seems to have ignored the fact that the Lanka accurately characterised the accord as horse-trading between the Indian and Sri Tamil and Sri Lankan masses. The LTTE is a part of this robber gang and is in no way a revolutionary force. Its quarrel with the Indians is not about transferring social and economic power to the masses. For their part, the Indians terests do not establish military bases in Sni of the Indian peace keeping force from Sri The Revolutionary Marxist Party of Sri Lankan bourgeoisies, over the heads of the want to ensure that the US and other western in- Another 1,000 were militants of other groups power to outgun its democrilic and left-wing the awkward issues of caste, class and women's timated 3,000 Eelam militants have died. 1,500 were killed by the Sri Lankan army or police. right-wing of all the Felam groups. Instead of promoting political debate and dialogue with their programme and their actions, socialists must consistently seek to break the bourgeois This the LTTE will not do. It is the most other Tamil liberation groups it has attempted to anniliate them - particularly those who raise oppression. Since it is backed by powerful bourgenis interests, it undoubtedly has the fire- opponents. Between 1983 and 1987, an es- and petty-bourgeois stranglehold. Page 22
Is Thatcherism' a completely new political phenomenon, or just a handy smokescreen to mask the capitulation of sections of the Labour, trade union and Communist Party leaderships? Or is the truth In the last issue of Socialist Outlook Phil Hearse in a controversial article suggested Thatcherism Here, JOHN LISTER, opposing the notion of 'semi-bonapartism', widens the debate by looking in Future articles continuing this debate will also include a political assessment of the Charter 88' more depth at the origins of Thatcherism and its dependence upon the weakness of leadership in the ', and embodied elements of 'semi-bonapartism'.