Editorial - The Island
IGP Mahinda Balasuriya has resigned over Monday's shooting incident in Katunayake taking the full responsibility for it. The police personnel deployed to maintain law and order there, the government says, acted on their own when they opened fire on a group of protesters, some of whom were injured seriously. One of the victims is reported to be battling death.
Have the IGP and the government taken the discerning public for suckers? If the police are free to pull the trigger in that manner, then the government and the outgoing IGP should explain why the police did not open fire on a gang of thugs who descended on a group of Opposition activists engaged in a peaceful protest in Colombo on Feb. 4 this year, while the country was celebrating Independence. There have been many instances of even tough cops refraining from shooting in spite of being beaten by political thugs. A posse of Police Narcotics Bureau sleuths once came under attack by Minister Mervyn Silva's son and his goons during a raid on a Colombo night club but the perpetrators did not get shot, did they?
moreMonday's attack the police carried out on the Export Processing Zone (EPZ) protesters was not unprovoked, though the force they unleashed was undoubtedly disproportionate to the threat. Those who ordered the deployment of armed police at the scene of protest cannot absolve themselves of the responsibility for the unfortunate incident. The same goes for the architects of the Private Sector Pension Scheme (PSPS) and the politically motivated violent elements that used the protesters as a shield to attack the police and thereby triggered a backlash.
Now that the IGP has taken the responsibility for the incident and resigned, it behoves the politicians including Minister of Labour Gamini Lokuge, responsible for formulating PSPS, the mother of all battles, to follow suit.
The EPZ workers, whose sweat fuels the national economy, could have won their trade union battle at issue without shedding a single drop of blood. They managed to humble the government and give it the jitters with their first protest last week. They should have waited till the floundering government worthies buckled. A violent sequel was uncalled for; it only helped some bankrupt political elements thirsting for blood and looking for corpses to gain some mileage; those vultures are waiting in the wings!
It is high time workers realised the need to free themselves from the clutches of political parties and trade unions with political links. The SLFP which makes a public display of its love for the working class has the blood of workers on its hands. The UNP, which has taken up the cudgels for the EPZ workers over PSPS, sacked more than 50,000 workers in 1980 for demanding a pay hike of Rs. 300 and did away with the non-contributory pension for public workers with effect from 2003 under the UNF government; it introduced a contributory pension scheme where workers had to contribute as much as 8 per cent of their salaries. The JVP, to its credit, successfully invoked the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court against that scheme and the UPFA government, which came to power in 2004, scrapped it. The JVP, which is weeping buckets for the workers injured in Monday's attack, gunned down scores of trade union leaders including George Ratnayake, P. D. Wimalasena and L. W. Panditha during its reign of terror in the late 1980s. It went all out to destroy the mainstream trade unions that refused to give in to its terror.
Politicians' love for unionised labour is only lack of opportunity or power to crush it if how successive governments have handled workers' struggles is anything to go by. Hence the need for workers to be wary of being used by wily politicians as a cat's paw to pull political chestnuts out of the fire!
