A FIERCE struggle has erupted in Sri Lanka between the military-police dictatorship of Mahinda Rajapakse and over a hundred thousand garment workers in the Free Trade Zone next to Colombo International Airport.
Four workers have died as a result of the state’s failed efforts to crush the strike movement by mainly women workers over the attack on their pensions. These pensions are vital to their survival, in a country where wages are at a minuscule £1 a day level, ensuring huge profits for international clothing companies super-exploiting the Sri Lankan workers.
Now the scheme has been suspended and working class anger has forced the resignation of the national police chief and the arrest of two police inspectors involved in opening fire on the striking workers.
After going to war against the Tamil people to crush the Tamil Tigers’ struggle for independence in 2008-09, the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie, headed by the Rajapakse dictatorship, is trying to crush the working class on behalf of international capital, whose interests it protects.
The Rajapakse regime has now suffered its first serious reverse, at the hands of tens of thousands of mainly women workers, a defeat that will encourage Sri Lankan workers all over the country to fight for their rights.
Sri Lanka’s garment industry, centred on the Free Trade Zone, employs hundreds of thousands of workers – largely young women driven from their homes in the countryside to seek work – and one million workers nationally.
Up to 60,000 workers took to the streets to join the first protests on Monday. Over 50 workers were arrested in the attacks, with many wounded and four who have since died from their wounds. Nevertheless, the workers broke through the police lines and put the riot police to flight.
The Joint Trade Union Alliance met on Wednesday to draw up plans to fight for workers’ pension rights. ‘We have a membership of over a million workers, and they will be mobilised,’ the JTUA warned the Rajapakse government.
The trade unions now face massive demands from workers for a general strike to gain big wage rises to keep pace with the leap in living costs and to defend pensions and all jobs.
Sri Lankan youth are facing permanent mass unemployment and are also demanding a future. Now they will turn en masse to the working class, as the only class capable of fighting and winning a future.
Sri Lanka is now on the road to a general strike of the whole working class from garment to transport, hospital, education, tea, rubber and rice plantation workers.
The Rajapakse regime used massive force in its war against the Tamil Tigers, murdering their leaders in cold blood and slaughtering tens of thousands of Tamil men, women and children, and leaving over 100,000 more ‘disappeared’.
But now it is growing increasingly fearful, since it faces a working class that will unite the people, the rural poor, the middle class and the Tamil and Muslim people, for the revolutionary overthrow of the Rajapakse dictatorship.
There must be a revolutionary general strike that will bring down the Rajapakse regime, and bring in a workers and small farmers government to expropriate the bosses and the bankers and nationalise the major industries, breaking the grip of the imperialist powers on the island, and beginning a socialist revolution.
This revolution will give the Tamil people their right to self-determination while urging them to unite with the working class as a whole to establish a workers republic.
The urgent question of the hour is the building up of the revolutionary leadership of the Trotskyist movement to lead this struggle to victory, and to show the way forward to the working class of the entire Indian sub-continent and South East Asia.
