JVP

Anura Kumara Dissanayake

Comrade President? Change and continuity in Sri Lanka

Balasingham Skanthakumar — Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s victory on 21 September as the candidate of the centre-left National People’s Power (NPP) coalition is highly significant for symbolic and substantive reasons.

Sri Lanka: The politics of the Frontline Socialist Party -- interview with Premakumar Gunaratnam

Premakumar Gunaratnam. Photo by Peter Boyle.

For more coverage of Sri Lanka and the Tamil struggle, click HERE.

August 8, 2012 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal/Green Left Weekly -- Premakumar Gunaratnam, an ethnic Tamil from Sri Lanka, who now has Australian citizenship, returned to his home country in September 2011 to help organise the launch of a new left party, the Frontline Socialist Party (FLSP), a major breakaway from the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP, People’s Liberation Front). He had been a JVP activist for three decades and a member of its underground political bureau since 1994. In an extensive interview with Peter Boyle for Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal and Green Left Weekly, Gunaratnam reported how he was abducted by a group of armed men between 4 am and 5 am on April 7, just two days before the scheduled launch of the new party.