'JR' wins six years in control
Socialist Organiser1983 1983-01-06Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 4 →
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Subscribe! DESPITE the glossy holiday brochures, it's no paradise for workers on the "paradise island" of Sri Lanka.
Right wing President J.R. Jayawardene has since his election five years ago embarked upon a Thatcherstyle process of opening up the whole island to the plundering attentions of multinational , corporations -offering a low-paid, repressed workforce and a minimum of overhead taxation.
Anti-union laws, backed up by a continuing state of emergency in force since 1980, and an appalling lack of social services, keep down the costs to imperialist investors as JR' attempts to attract sufficient industry to turn Sri Lanka into a new South Korea or Taiwan.
But such policies have not gone without opposition in Sri Lanka. In October wirs io rule ably outstripped a divided political opposition, securing 52% of the vote in Presidential elections.
- But were the same voting pattern to be repeated in Parliamentary elections due this year, he would have found his overwhelming domination of the 168-member Parliament (in which his UNP currently holds 143 seats) substantially undermined. The Sri, Lanka Freedom. Party, led by former Prime Minister Mrs Bandaranaıke, which has six MPs would have stood to win 60 seats.
Referendum
Under such conditions Jayawardene could have "faced problems in holding his ruthless . economic policies.
His answer? To seek a referendum on the proposal to suspend parliamentary elections until 1989, leaving the existing MPs in office for an extra six years! He went further - arguing that he needed 15 years uninterrupted rule for his plans to reach fruition!
The campaign over the referendum was conducted under the state of emergency though. Mrs Bandaranaıke, (who is formally deprived of all civic rights for seven years following political offences during her term of ofticer was allowed to campaign agains: the proposal and attracted large crowds of supponers.
The fight for : no' vote was also supported by the Sri Lankan Communist Pariy and their daùy paper fihtha was suspended by the government. Lankan population is the oppressed Tamil minority living largely in the north of the island, whose Tamil United Liberation Front also campaigned against the referendum.
But on Wednesday December 22, the referendum produced a majority for Jayawardene by a margin of 3.1 million to 4.6 milion votes, and the next day the 79-year old President signed a law suspending elections for six years.
Rates: £5 for three months, £8.75 for six months, and £16 for a year.
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To: Socialist Organi901, 28 Middle Lane, London N8 8PL. her careerist bourgeois followers will no doubt find ways and means of securing their interests under the semi-dictatorship of Jayawardene, the full brunt of these latest changes will fall upon the working masses of Sri Lanka who face an austerity programme designed to confront Sri Lanka's chronic balance of payments crisis, and a prolonged period of superexploitation at the hands of Jayawardene's multi-national sponsors.