STRIKES AND COMMUNAL RIOTS Discredited by their strike-breaking tactics against the successful strikes of the Trotskyist-led Ceylon Federation of Labour (reported in our last issue), and fearing to lose their positions as union functionaries among government clerical employees and tea- and rubber-packing workers, the Ceylonese Stalinists tried recently to regain prestige by calling out on strike the Public Service Workers' Trade Union Federation, and the packing-industry workers under their control. The Lanka Samasamaja Party (Ceylonese Section of the Fourth International) disagreed with the original demands and could not persuade the Stalinists to discuss their reformulation. Indeed, the Stalinists passed the word to the factory committees that if LSSP unionists joined in the strike in any plant, the strike was immediately to be called off there because they did not "want the collaboration of 'anti-government' forces." (In return for its establishing full diplomatic relations with the Soviet bloc and with Peiping, the Ceylonese Stalinists support the MEP capitalist government of CeyBut, though it could not back the strike's incorrect demands, the LSSP moved swiftly to protect the strike when the government tried to break it by the use of scabs under military protection. Under threat of direct action by the LSSP and unions it leads, the troops were action was being planned by the LSSP and other workers' organizations to aid the strike when it was suddenly called off by the Stalinist leadership with nothing whatsoever gained. As a result, practically all branch unions of the Government Clerical Servants' Union passed resolutions parent body to disaffiliate from the Stalinist-controlled The strike in the private sector continued a while longer, but its Stalinist leadership abandoned all demands and agreed to return to work provided there was no victimization. employers, however, encouraged by the government, flatly refused; and it was only when the government had its hands full with the outburst of communal rioting that the workers were able to get back without victimization, but with nothing These experiences have revealed more plainly than ever to the Ceylonese workers not only the incompetence and lack of militancy of the Stalinist union leaders, but also the real nature of the MEP government which the Stalinists still try to present as "progressive." The last days of May witnessed communal rioting unprecendented in Ceylon. Though it took communal form, the basic cause was also economic. Tamil laborers, brought in during the last century from India as indentured labor, mihabit the land-hungry Northern and Eastern areas. Until recent years they and the dominant Sinhalese majority lived peacefully together. Want, however, drove more and more lamils to emigrate south in search of employment. In a country of over 100,000 registered (and in reality an estimated 1.5 million) unemployed or underemployed out of a total population of 9 million, it was easy for reactionary elements in the Sinhalese middle class to stir up unemployed landless Sinhalese peasants to the belief that they could get work on the estates if the Tamils were expelled from Ceylon. It had been assumed that when English was given up as the official language, it would be replaced by both Sinhalese and Tamil. But in the 1956 elections the then ruling United National Party took a position favoring Sinhalese only, and the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna, competing bourgeois party of the present Prime Minister, Mr S W R D Bandaranaike, promptly outbid the UNP in racial extremism. When the elections buried the UNP, and swept the MEP into government power and the LSSP into being the main opposition the language question was still secondary; and had the MEP done anything to implement its election promises of nationalization of plantations, etc., communalism would have been short-lived. But the MEP, welshing on its pledges, tried to distract the masses by bringing out the Sinhalese Only Act, urged by reactionary middle-class MEP elements as automatically excluding Tamil-speaking intellectuals from that they themselves coveted. The at the cost of temporary loss of influence in the Sinhalese sector, adopted the unpopular but principled position of equality for the two languages. Tamil resistance forced Premier Bandaranaike after a few months to yield ground by recognizing Tamil in government workânot officially, but through a secret pact with the Tamil communalist organization, the Federal Party. But the defeated UNP seized this occasion to step up its anti-Tamil campaign, and the MEP once more competed with it in Sinhalese demagogy. Finally, on May 26th, sparked by the UNP, there burst out an orgy of murder, looting, arson, mutilation, and rape against the Tamils. The police, always so quick to fire on strikers, had received instructions from Bandaranaike not to fire at rioting communalists, and they looked calmly on as the rioting developed. The LSSP warned the Prime Minister that if he continued to fail to provide security for all Ceylonese, it would immediately organize the working class and the broad masses in their own defense organizations. Late on the 27th, Bandaranaike declared a state of emer-
it magh be said that ine Pal published and distributed more di manted i ths damri uted during the May 28th demongency, and by the 29th the rioting was under control. But under cover of the state of emergency the Governor General and the Prime Minister have been taking various undemocratic measures, such as the outlawing of political parties, press censorship, arrests of deputies despite parliamentary immunity, and other disquieting actions. These have been
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL sharply protested in the House of Representatives by Comrade N M Perera of the LSSP. As of the date of writing, the state of emergency and curfew continue, with the Tamil areas particularly under heavy military occupation. The communal problem remains unresolved and menacing, and the situation continues tense.
France