Tribute To My Father

 

The twenty-fifth anniversary of Back July 1983 is an appropriate time to remember my father, C.R. (‘Dick’) Hensman, who died peacefully on 9 July 2008. At that time, under the pseudonym L. Piyadasa, he wrote a book – Sri Lanka: The Holocaust and After (published by Marram Books in 1984) – which documented and analysed the events not only of that fateful day but also of the periods preceding and following it. This was one of the first publications to expose the shocking evidence of government sponsorship of the violence, and involvement of people at the highest levels of power in what would today be classified as crimes against humanity.

The analysis was continued in a sequel, Sri Lanka: The Unfinished Quest for Peace, (Marram Books, 1987), published following the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987. What was striking was that it attributed the violence not to widespread inter-ethnic hatred but to the drifting of the Sri Lankan state towards fascism. It was made very clear in both books that the solution was not a separate Tamil Eelam, which would inevitably suffer from the same authoritarian and exclusivist politics as the proposed Sinhala Buddhist state, but a Sri Lanka where people from all ethnic and religious communities could live in any part of the island in security, dignity and peace. His message remains as relevant today as it was then.

Democracy as the Solution to Sri Lanka's Ethnic Crisis

The political Right and Left seem to concur in linking democracy to bourgeois rule; the two concepts have even been hyphenated in the adjective ‘bourgeois-democratic’. Yet history gives us no reason to believe that there is a necessary connection between the two. It is true that when the bourgeoisie is fighting against feudal power to establish its rule, it seeks the support of the plebeian masses, and in the process allows them to fight for their own demands: hence the famous slogan of the French Revolution, ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’. Yet once their rule is established, they are quite capable of turning on their erstwhile allies, repressing or even slaughtering them. This is not to say that capitalism is incompatible with democratic rights and freedoms either, but to emphasise that the latter will prevail only if working people fight to establish and defend them. Even in advanced capitalist countries, long-established rights can quickly be demolished. Social-Democracy in Germany was followed by fascism, and even today, democratic rights are under attack in the heartlands of capitalism.

In the former colonies, there was likewise a popular movement for liberation from imperialism, often followed by a sense of disappointment when independence was won but the working masses remained in much the same condition as before. Again, the illusion that democracy is the free gift of the bourgeoise, or a necessary condition of their rule, is responsible for this disappointment. Alternatively, there has been a tendency, shared by both Maoists and Trotskyists, to deny that a bourgeois revolution has taken place or that capitalism is developing. A more realistic view would be to recognise that for the working class, independence from colonialism is only the first of many battles for democracy.