JVP seeks Tamil support

[TamilNet, Monday, 06 October 1997, 23:59 GMT]
The General Secretary of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna told the Sinhala press today that his 'party' was going to hold propaganda meetings in the main towns of the northeast to muster Tamil support for the group's campaign against the devolution package proposed by the PA regime. The JVP is a militant left wing Sinhala revolutionary group that led two bloody insurrections to capture state power.

The group has made a comeback in recent years, profiting mainly from the growing poverty in the Sinhala rural areas and disillusionment with the war. It has taken up the position that any devolution to the Tamil people will divide Sri Lanka.

The JVP began a campaign last month from Anuradhapura to stir the Sinhala people against granting regional autonomy to the Tamils. The general secretary of the group warned the Sinhalese that (LTTE leader) Pirabakaran would become the Inspector General of Police in an autonomous Tamil region!

The JVP officially denies racism. It woos Tamil youth in the Sinhala areas and in the plantation sector with the slogan that socialism is the solution to all social and political problems in the island including the ethnic conflict.

It says that the struggle for the sovereign state of Thamil Eelam is a CIA instigated imperialist plot to splinter south Asia. It espouses a textbook version of 'Stalinist Marxism' and asserts that the main issue for Tamils is class oppression and not ethnic discrimination.

"The presence of the Sri Lankan army in some of our towns has given these red Sinhala chauvinists the audacity to air such brazen views among the war battered Tamils" said a senior Tamil leftist in Trincomalee who regularly criticises the opportunistic politics of some mainstream and revolutionary Sinhala Marxists.