Fight the Terror
Election victories are variously celebrated. It has become the fashion in. Sri Lanka to celebrate such victories with the molestation and harassment of opponents of the victors and with murder, arson, looting and destruction generally of the property of the defeated, especially their dwellings. In short, victory is celebrated through a process of terror against the defeated.
The fashion began in 1965, when the U. N. P. won. It went further in 1970 when the S.L.F.P. adopted it as a form of celebration of the United Front's victory. Now, in 1977, the U.N.P. in victory has carried the fashion to the point of a preplanned and systematic terror to which there seem to be no bounds. There is more than mere revenge. It is a planned effort to terrorise political opponents into permanent submission. It cannot be allowed to succeed. If the freedom of the franchise and the right to political opposition those essential features of the democratic process are to be safe-guarded and kept operative, the effort must not be allowed to succeed. It must be defeated and overcome.
The task cannot be left to the Government, and not only because it is a U. N. P. Government behind which the current terror takes shelter. It cannot be left to the police and the military, which, after all, are themselves only instruments of official terror when used against the people of their own country. The people, the masses in action, must undertake the task. Only then can this foul phenomenon be wiped out for good.
How are the masses to come into action? By organising them-selves in their villages and hamlets, their wards and their precincts, against the terror, to resist the terror and to protect fellow-citizens and neighbours from the terror. Come together, functioning in the mass! The weapons needed are there in your homes, your fences, your gardens. And if anyone is worried about the law, the law is in your favour. In fighting the terror you will be engaged in the legitimate exercise of the right of private defence.
There will be those who try to discourage the masses from going into organised action by saying: "Leave it to the police and the authorities." We have so left it to them for over a week - and tile error still goes on.
A genuinely independent Commission can, no doubt, do some good, but reports take time and compensation has to follow the report. What is wanted is action now to stop the terror.
Also, if the masses don't come into action, individuals in desperation may go into action. This must be prevented from happening, if possible even if it is directed against leaders of the terror and the organisers of the terror behind the scenes. Such a situation must be prevented because, as Lenin taught us, individual terrorism diverts the mass movement from the class struggle and tile class struggle alone provides the road to power of the revolutionary class.
Organise the masses in town and country against the U.N.P. - Capitalist terror terror.
Bring the masses into action to stem, turn back and defeat the U.N.P. terror!
There is no other way of preventing the masses from being lastingly intimidated by the Capitalist-organised hoodlums.
August 1977.
