MORATUWA, Sri Lanka – The president and secretary of the Podujana Pragathishili Sevaka Sangamaya (PPSS) violently attacked two members of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) at the Moratuwa University. PPSS is a trade union controlled by the right-wing ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), led by former president and prime minister Mahinda Rajapakse, which elected current President Ranil Wickremesinghe.
The attack took place while an SEP team was campaigning at the rear gate of the Moratuwa campus for upcoming public meetings to be addressed by Joseph Kishore, the national secretary of the SEP (US). They were distributing a notice titled “SEP (US) national secretary to visit Sri Lanka to speak on the centenary of Trotskyism.”
The attackers, identified as Indika Perera and Suranga Piyawardena, arrived at the scene armed with long wooden clubs and launched a premeditated assault on the SEP members. These trade union leaders at the Moratuwa campus are part of the SLPP’s goon squads, which operate in many workplaces to silence opposition among workers.
The SEP and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) will campaign to defend our comrades and the party’s democratic right to carry on its political activities. The ruling party is desperate because it is utterly discredited among the masses.
Wickremesinghe and the SLPP are ruthlessly implementing the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-dictated austerity program, slashing jobs, wages and pensions, privatising, cutting social programs, including public health and education, and increasing the prices of essentials to unbearable levels.
The Wickremesinghe regime is facing enormous opposition from workers, students and rural poor as a result. While seeking to block this mass opposition by using the trade union bureaucracies, it is also unleashing the repressive police-military machinery and goon squads to crush the growing opposition.
The SEP and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) will campaign to defend our comrades and the party’s democratic right to carry on its political activities. These trade union leaders at the Moratuwa campus are part of the SLPP’s goon squads, which operate in many workplaces to silence opposition among workers.
We also call on workers and youth to attend our important public meetings addressed by comrade Joseph Kishore, the US SEP national secretary, in Peradeniya, on December 7 at 3 p.m. at Hall no. 86, Political Science Department in the University of Peradeniya and in Colombo, on December 10 at 3 p.m. at New Town Hall.