Sri Lankan election: Vote for the Socialist Equality Party (Feb 14th)

[Joanne98]

By the Socialist Equality Party

13 February 2009

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) calls on working people to vote for its candidates in Sri Lanka's provincial council elections on February 14. A vote for the SEP is a vote for a socialist program to end the government's communal war, attacks on democratic rights and deepening assault on living standards.


The SEP is fielding two slates of 19 candidates—one in Nuwara Eliya district in Central Province and the other in Puttalam district in North-western Province. Mylvaganam Thevarajah heads the Nuwara Eliya slate and Nihal Geekiyanage leads the ticket in Puttalam. Both are longstanding SEP members with decades of experience in defending the democratic rights and class interests of all workers—Tamil, Sinhala and Muslim alike.


This election is dominated by the criminal war restarted and intensified by President Mahinda Rajapakse and his government. Rajapakse's renewed "war on terrorism" against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has resulted in more death, destruction and suffering than at any other time in the 25-year conflict. It has been fully backed by the two major opposition parties—the rightwing United National Party (UNP) and the Sinhala extremist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP).


The SEP candidates stand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all Sri Lankan security forces from the North and East of the island. In advancing this demand, the SEP offers no political support to the LTTE or its call for a separate capitalist statelet of Eelam. We seek to unify the working class and oppressed masses in a common struggle for a workers' and farmers' government based on socialist policies.


The SEP insists that socialism is not possible on one island. Any struggle against the Colombo government and local employers inevitably confronts powerful international forces. Behind Rajapakse's war lie its imperialist backers—above all, the US. At the same time, workers in Sri Lanka are part of the international working class, exploited by the same global giants as workers throughout Asia and across the globe.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/feb2009/seps-f13.shtml

They vote tommorrow. I hope it's a landslide.