ON Tuesday evening President Rajapaksa, the Sri Lankan president, was due to address the prestigious Oxford Union in front of an invited audience.
He had virtually sneaked into the country because he is waging a bloody war against the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, a war which has no support in this country.
He recently ripped up the cease-fire agreement that had been negotiated with the Tamil Tigers, the Tamil people’s defence movement, in order to fight the war to the bitter end.
So far thousands of Sri Lankan soldiers have been killed and wounded, and tens of thousands of Tamils have been dispossessed.
At the same time he has jailed hundreds of political opponents without charge or trial, with many of them claiming that they are being routinely tortured, while a growing number of opponents have just disappeared off of the face of the earth, the victims of death squads.
In a country where the inflation rate is now over 30 per cent and many people cannot even afford a bowl of rice a day, he has threatened trade unionists who want to strike for better wages with illegality and prison, and called trade unionism terrorism.
For the British ruling class none of these atrocities constitute a problem.
There is a reason for the fact that at the same time as Labour denounces the ‘Burmese dictatorship’ and calls for its removal, they cling determinedly to a dictator who wants to wipe out the Tamils and break the trade unions.
The reason is that Rajapaksa is their man and is defending the interests of British imperialism in the island of Sri Lanka.
The President enjoys a special relationship with the British ruling class which ruled Sri Lanka as part of its colonial empire until 1948.
Today, British capitalists have major investments in the New Economic Zones which produce a good part of the world’s cheap clothing, from which the British capitalists make huge profits.
The wages that are paid in the NEZ factories are around £1 a day. Even though the clothing and shoes are sold cheaply in Britain, the British bosses make huge profits from their investment and count the supply of cheap clothing as vital for helping to keep the wages of British workers down.
Rajapaksa can do no wrong as far as the British bosses are concerned. They are relying on him to protect their investments through crushing the Tamil Tigers, and by smashing trade unions to keep the wages of Sri Lankan workers down, even though these wages are being cut every day by the advance of inflation.
In return, the UK government says not a word about the atrocities of the Rajapaksa regime.
In fact the British government plays a vital role in the military training of the Sri Lankan armed forces and in securing it a supply and re-supply of bombs, guns, planes and ammunition.
They have also proscribed the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist movement and made it a criminal offence in Britain to organise support for the Tigers.
The Labour government can see or hear no evil as far as Rajapaksa is concerned. However the trade unions in Britain must not behave in the same way.
They must take up the struggle and defend the Tamil people and the trade unionists of Sri Lanka.
They must publicly demand an end to the war against the Tamils and also demand that the Tamil Tigers cease to be a proscribed movement.
They must picket and demonstrate outside the Sri Lankan embassy and outside 10 Downing Street to demand those Sri Lankans who have been jailed without charge or trial are freed at once, and that the trade unions are allowed the freedom to take strike action to raise wages in the face of rampant inflation.
The British trade unions must invite the leaders of the Tamil people, and the Sri Lankan trade union movement to their conferences this summer and proclaim that they have every right to overthrow the Rajapaksa regime and to bring in a workers and small farmers government that will unite the Sinhalese and Tamil workers in the fight to establish socialism.