October 10, 1988

The International Committee of the Fourth International sends its revolutionary greetings to Comrade Brutan Perera and pledges to redouble its worldwide campaign to free him from the clutches of the gangster Jayewardene regime.

Since June, Comrade Perera has been jailed on two separate occasions—each time on pretexts so flimsy that they have even proved embarrassing to the Sri Lankan judiciary, an institution thoroughly implicated in the crimes of the government.

After the first arrest—which kept Brutan Perera and two other comrades, Wije Dias and Ruman Perera, in jail for 44 days—the attorney general ordered the prisoners released on bail and the Supreme Court was compelled to concede that there existed evidence that the detentions were carried out in violation of their fundamental rights.

This did not prevent the police from rearresting Comrade Brutan within a week, along with a leader of the RCL’s youth movement, Viran Peiris. After three weeks, Comrade Peiris was released, but Brutan has remained in jail since August 21.

Were it not for the fact that the Jayewardene regime is notorious all over the world for its crazed genocidal terror against the Tamil people, we would denounce the arrests as a brazen violation of democratic rights. But the state of affairs that exists in Sri Lanka can no longer be comprehended in such prosaic terms. Rather, we denounce these arrests as an example of the class war being waged by the regime and the entire Sri Lankan bourgeoisie against all sections of the working class and oppressed peasantry in the South and the ferocious repression of the Tamil nation in the North.

It is the task of the international working class to come to the aid of Brutan Perera and all those who are languishing in the jails and concentration camps of Jayewardene’s dictatorship. The fact that the real state of affairs in Sri Lanka is not more widely known is due to the fact that the policies of Jayewardene enjoy the support of world imperialism and a concerted effort is being made in the capitalist press to conceal the truth.

The International Committee is proud of Comrade Brutan’s courageous stand which vividly illustrates the unshakeable devotion of Trotskyists to the combined and inseparable goals of national liberation and socialist revolution.