On the 8th and 9th of March at the New Library Hall in Colombo the SPSL held a successful conference with comrades from across the country participating. Read more...

A disaster faces the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa. War and economic instability is causing suffering of the Sri Lanka masses and only socialism can offer a way out. Read more...

The first political party to be founded in the British colony of Ceylon, in 1935, was a workers’ party, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party or Ceylon Equal Society Party (LSSP). The first Communist (Stalinist) Party on the island originated from a minority split in the LSSP in 1940. During the Second World War the LSSP itself split with a section of it – the Bolshevik Samasamaja Party – rallying to the Fourth International. Re-unification of the BSP and the LSSP in 1950 saw the latter become a section of the Fourth International. Read more...

The ongoing offensive by the Sri Lankan army against the bases of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), commonly known as the Tamil Tigers, indicates the determination of the present government to isolate and militarily defeat them. Read more...

The Sri Lanka Freedom Party government headed by Mahine Rajapakse has dramatically escalated the war against the Tamil people. The civil war against the Tamil resistance movement, which is headed by the LTTE, also known as the Tamil Tigers, has been raging since 1983. Even though there is technically a ceasefire, the fighting in the last 6 months has left 4000 dead. The government escalation of the conflict resulted in a guns instead of butter budget with inflation of around 20 per cent. The fighting has disrupted food production in the already poor regions in the north and east, and now starvation is causing extra suffering. Thousands of people are internally displaced, living in refugee camps and shanty towns with no adequate facilities. Read more...

The ongoing offensive by government forces in Sri Lanka is part of a new phase in the Sinhala chauvinist coalition’s attempts to defeat the Tamil Tigers, the main armed force amongst the Tamil minority. It marks the de facto collapse of a ceasefire brokered by Norwegian mediation in 2002, which ended almost 20 years of war. The ceasefire led to no serious concessions to the Tamils demands. It was effectively ripped up by the new government of Prime minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake in 2005. Read more...

1. The India Sri Lanka Accord of July 1987 represents the latest attempt at imposing a reactionary settlement on the national struggle of the Tamil people. The accord proposed autonomy which demanded the disarming of the only force enjoying the support of the Tamil people and reliance on Indian troops responsible for the repression of national groups inside India. It proposed a referendum in the Eastern Province in late 1988 to decide whether to continue links with the Northern Province. Read more...

For the past six months in Sri Lanka political attention has been fixed on the fate of discussions between the various Tamil guerrilla groups and the United National Party (UNP) government. Also involved in these talks was Rajin Ghandi’s government in India. Neither the ‘ceasefire’ that accompanied the discussions, nor the discussions themselves were a success from the Tamils’ point of view. Read more...

Ranged against Jayawardene are the organisations of the Tamils, many of which have taken up the armed struggle. How should revolutionaries assess the role of the guerrilla organisations in the present struggle? What has the last twelve months revealed about their petit bourgeois nationalism? Read more...

July’s carnage on the streets of the capital Colombo was neither a new nor an unexpected event. Attacks on the 2.8 million minority Tamil population have been regularly aided and abetted by Sri Lanka’s 30,000 strong police force and army 98% of whom are drawn from the 11 million strong Sinhalese majority population. Read more...