Forging New Alliances

The university teachers (FUTA)  joining the recent demonstration held by the school teachers in Colombo, was a very good development. The union leadership has to congratulated for building such solidarity. Normally we are used to fight our own battles in isolation.

In the present circumstances, such struggles are doomed to fail. Let the workers, peasants and fishermen search and identify areas where all can join and forge a common struggle. 

In view of that a new understanding of the 'oppressed class' is required. In the past, we understood only the factory workers or peasants are oppressed. The policies of the neo-liberalism and market economy has had its influence not only on the field of education but also on several other fields such as health, social welfare, agriculture and fisheries and so on. The peasants and fishermen have been affected by land grab in the name of tourism. 

Thus, today it looks that all except the politicians have fallen into the oppressed class. Not only the workers, peasants but also the doctors, university teachers, school teachers all belonged to the oppressed category.

The percentage of allocations in the national budget for the welfare of workers, fisheries and agriculture ought to be raised and the allocations for defense ought to be reduced in this post war era.

An enlightened leadership such as FUTA or teachers' unions need to take the initiative to forge an alliance of these oppressed people which can act as a counter force and resist the market policies or neoliberal policies currently being carried out by the present regime or even by the one that would come next.

The Current Challenges to the Citizens

I thought of addressing those friends of ours who have interest in the welfare of the poor in Sri Lanka.  

Currently we are facing several challenging events. One of them is the three months long strike of the university teachers. A few key demands of the university teachers are :

·       To increase from 1.8% to 6% of the GDP the government allocations for education. 

·       To stop the political interference with the university administration.

·       A salary increase for the university teachers.

Unless the allocations are increased for the universities, they will not be able to maintain a good academic staff. Many well qualified dons have begun to leave our land to take up better jobs in various foreign universities. Already there are about 3000 vacancies in the 16 universities in the country.  

Due to cut down of funds, the Free Education system that we had will gradually disappear and this will make the poor to pay for the education of their children.

Therefore the issue is one of national importance. We therefore thought we should join in this campaign. We organized events to educate the general public on this topic and also took part in their Walk. The strike went on for 100 days. At the moment it has been suspended and the universities will resume teaching from Monday.  

The second recent event was the physical assault on the secretary of the judiciary by some unknown men.

This reflects the kind of dictatorial government we have now in Sri Lanka. With the introduction of the 18th amendment to the constitution, the executive has taken over unto himself all the powers which the legislature and judiciary exercised up to now. The signs of dictatorship were seen emerging since then. The assault on the secretary of the judiciary demonstrates that the democratic form of governance has reached its last stages.

We as citizens are now confronted with the challenge of overcoming this threat to democracy. In the present context we do not expect the opposition to do anything. The present political parties are very unreliable. During the last few decades many presidential candidates although promised to do away with the executive presidency but once in power they forget their promises.

In our view more civil groups with foresight should come forward. They are more dependable. We expect that they will give a leadership to people’s power type mobilization strategy.