THE Brown government rails on about ‘breaches of human rights’ allegedly taking place in Zimbabwe and Burma, and makes all kinds of allegations concerning what the Sudanese government is doing in Darfur, yet it keeps a deadly silence over the actions of the Rajapaksa government in Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka is now the leading country on the planet for ‘disappearances’. This happens when men, women and even children are picked up by the Sri Lankan military and police, and jailed and tortured and even murdered, without charge or trial, and without the state even accepting that it is holding them.
Hundreds of opponents of the regime, Tamils, trade unionists and Sinhalese have now disappeared, feared dead, and the number is increasing all the time.
Yet the Brown government while it threatens to ban the Zimbabwe cricket team from coming to the UK, is blind as far as the Sri Lankan atrocities are concerned, and allows the English cricket team to visit Sri Lanka without a qualm.
In fact, the Rajapaksa government has recently ripped up the Cease Fire Agreement with the Tamil Tigers and has launched a bloody war on the Tamil People in the north and the east of the country.
At the same time it has declared war on the Sri Lankan trade unions, whose members are desperate for higher wages since they are going hungry because of the huge increases in the price of oil and other basic commodities, including the basic foodstuff, rice.
Rajapaksa has called the trade unions ‘terrorist,’ and branded them as being the same as the Tigers, and being enemies of the state.
And yet again, the Brown regime, with its ‘Christian foreign policy’ remains silent.
In fact, the Rajapaksa regime is its government, since there are huge British investments in the country’s New Economic Zones, particularly in the clothing industry, where Brown’s policy is that wages must be kept down, so that cheap clothing exports to the UK can help to keep British workers’ wages down.
The Brown government’s message to Rajapaksa is to fight the trade unions for the benefit of the British bosses.
The Brown government has also given its full support to the Rajapaksa government’s attacks on the Tamil people of the north and east and the Tamil Tigers which defends them.
It has the same type of policy as it has in Palestine. There Brown calls the Israelis democrats, and gives them a license to kill, while the Palestinians are denounced as terrorists.
In Sri Lanka, the Rajapaksa government gets all kinds of aid both civilian and military, while the victims of Rajapaksa’s attacks are demonised as terrorists, and their defenders the Tamil Tigers are proscribed, so that it is illegal in Britain to give financial and other support to the Tigers, or to be a member of the movement.
Meanwhile, with Brown silent, Rajapaksa’s death squads kill and abduct every day.
The British trade unions must stop hiding away from this issue and must condemn the UK government for supporting murder and disappearances in Sri Lanka.
The trade unions must demand that all British military and financial aid to Sri Lanka is halted at once.
The Tamil Tigers must be taken off the list of proscribed terrorist organisations while sanctions must be brought in against the Rajapaksa government.
The British trade unions must begin a campaign for the release of all political prisoners in Sri Lanka, and for the end of the state of emergency.
They must also stand for the right of the Tamil people to self determination, so that they can decide whether they wish to secede, or fight alongside the Sinhalese workers, for a workers and small farmers government and a Sri Lankan socialist republic based on the expropriation of the bosses and bankers and run by workers and peasants councils.
