Sri Lankan police brutally attack thousands of protesting teachers

Part of the teachers’ protest in front of Fort Railway Station in Colombo on 26 June 2024

On Wednesday, Sri Lankan police brutally attacked a demonstration of around 10,000 teachers outside the Fort Railway Station and the adjacent streets in Colombo. Three teachers were hospitalized and others were injured in an attack with water cannon and tear gas.

The police operation, which is undoubtedly orchestrated at the highest level of the state, is a stark warning to workers and young people. The government is responding to the massive social opposition with increasing repression.

The demonstration in Colombo, demanding payment of a long-overdue salary increase, was part of a nationwide call-in campaign that involved about 250,000 educators, including teachers, head teachers and trainers, on the day. The government mobilized hundreds of police, riot police and military forces, some armed with rifles, others with batons and tear gas, and stationed water cannon nearby.

The action on Wednesday was called by the Teachers and Principals Trade Union Alliance (TPTUA), an alliance of more than 20 teachers’ unions, including the Ceylon Teachers Union (CTU), the Ceylon Teachers Services Union (CTSU) – which is controlled by the opposition Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) – and the United Teacher Services Union, which is affiliated to the pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party.

Thousands of educators, including those from the north and east of the country, began gathering outside the Fort Railway Station at 9am, and their numbers grew as the hours went by. Then the police arrived with an order from the Colombo Fort Magistrate’s Court banning the demonstration from moving along certain roads.

Wickremesinghe government mobilizes police and military against protesting teachers in Colombo, Sri Lanka on June 26, 2024

The protesters, however, ignored the court’s order and marched to a nearby intersection leading to the Finance Ministry headquarters, chanting slogans such as “Ensure promotions in the service of teachers and headmasters,” “Provide school materials to children at low prices,” “Stop privatization of education,” and “Resolve the salary anomaly between teachers and headmasters!”

The teachers also called for a rejection of the government’s austerity measures taken by the International Monetary Fund.

Without warning, police began firing tear gas and using water cannon. A teacher told the media that about 50 people were injured in the attack. One teacher’s eye and both eyes of another were injured by the high-pressure water cannon and required surgery.

In view of the growing anger of teachers and workers over the brutal attack, the unions yesterday called for another nationwide day of industrial action in which all members of the education union took part.

During the demonstration on Tuesday, CTU and CTSU leaders Joseph Stalin and Mahinda Jayasinghe and some other union officials met with representatives of the Ministry of Finance. They went home empty-handed.

Stalin told the protesters that the discussions had achieved nothing. Then he demagogically declared: “This struggle will end with the fall of the government of the present President Ranil Wickremesinghe… How could Gotabhaya Rajapakse go home? This happened in a struggle that began with the struggle of the teachers.”

Stalin’s comments were a reference to the mass uprisings from April to July 2022 that led to the overthrow of former President Rajapakse and his government, as well as the 100-day teachers’ strike – from July to September 2021 – demanding higher wages and the elimination of salary anomalies.

CTSU chairman Jayasinghe told the protesters: “These problems will be solved by forming a people’s government.” Both politicians were referring to the upcoming presidential elections, which are scheduled for late September or early October.

The claim that the teachers’ demands will be met by Wickremesinghe’s electoral defeat is a treacherous attempt to politically suppress the growing resistance of the working class to the government’s IMF austerity measures.

The JVP and its affiliated trade unions are desperately supporting this propaganda. CSTU leader Jayasinghe is a member of the JVP Central Committee. But all opposition parliamentary parties, including the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), the JVP and its electoral front Jathika Jana Balawegaya, are fully supporting the IMF’s programme.

The thesis that everything will be resolved by the time of the election also gives the government and the state the necessary leeway to intensify their repressive measures.

The scale of the austerity measures demanded by the IMF is incompatible with democracy. While brazen police attacks on teachers are taking place in public, there is no doubt that even harsher authoritarian measures are being discussed behind closed doors.

Stalin’s account was based on a complete distortion of recent history. The 2021 national teachers’ strike was betrayed by the unions after meetings with Mahinda Rajapakse, the then Prime Minister. Union representatives supported the government’s claim that teachers’ salaries could not be increased due to Sri Lanka’s deepening economic crisis. They then accepted a deal of only one-third of the teachers’ salary demand and false promises that the rest would be paid in two instalments, the first in January 2022 and the rest in 2023.

Teachers’ union officials tried to justify their betrayal by claiming they had won “some kind of victory.” The government, of course, refused to pay the outstanding two-thirds of the salary increase as the economic crisis deepened following the outbreak of the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

Teachers and all sections of the Sri Lankan working class and poor are affected by the soaring prices of food, electricity and other essential goods, as well as the government’s brutal attacks on their social living conditions. The Wickremesinghe government’s brutal enforcement of IMF dictates has devastated the lives of millions of Sri Lankans.

Like its counterparts in other sectors, the leadership of the teachers’ union has been responding to these social attacks since 2022 with sporadic, limited and isolated protests, all aimed at dispelling the growing anger of its members.

Since January, union officials have called strikes and protests in the electricity, health, higher education, port, postal and education sectors to demand higher wages and fight privatization. But union bureaucracies are vehemently opposed to unified national action.

Yesterday, in a clear reference to the teachers’ protests and the ongoing strike by non-academic university employees, President Wickremesinghe reiterated that his government would not give public sector employees a pay rise. This could perhaps be considered next year, he said, but it would depend on whether the government could get spending under control – for example, through even bigger tax increases and welfare cuts.

The government is already putting pressure on workers and the poor by increasing VAT on all essential goods, raising prices of goods and services, and restructuring state-owned enterprises to privatize and commercialize them. The crackdown is primarily aimed at repaying foreign debt.

The government’s brutal police attacks on protesting teachers and its repeated declarations that there will be no wage increases for public sector workers this year make it clear that the entire working class is engaged in a political struggle against the Wickremesinghe government and the profit system itself.

World Socialist Website Supporters intervened in the teachers’ protest on Wednesday, distributing copies of the Socialist Equality Party’s (SEP) statement in Sinhala and Tamil in school districts outside Colombo: “Resist the attempt by Sri Lankan trade unions to subordinate class struggles to the coming elections! Prepare a general strike against the government’s austerity policies! Fight for socialist policies!”

The declaration calls on workers to form democratically elected action committees in their factories, plants and factories, independent of the trade union bureaucracies and capitalist parties to which they belong, in order to prepare a political general strike. This is the only way to defeat the austerity offensive, secure the social needs of the masses and prevent the introduction of openly authoritarian forms of rule.

The statement said: “For a political general strike to succeed, it is essential to move forward and build a Democratic and Socialist Congress of Workers and Rural People (DSC), composed of democratically elected delegates from action committees across the island. The SEP initiated this program in mid-July 2022, during the mass uprising to counter the capitalist onslaught.

“The workers do not need a capitalist government of the ruling parties or the opposition SJB, JVP or any other political formation that will continue to impose IMF austerity policies. They need a workers’ and peasants’ government that implements a socialist program. The DSC would prepare and mobilize the revolutionary force of the working class to overthrow the capitalist state and pave the way for a workers’ and peasants’ government.”

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