Below is the text of the speech made by Sanjaya Wilson Jayasekera, the Attorney-at-Law of the detained poet Ahnaf Jazeem at the public Zoom meeting held on 06 June 2021. Jayasekera spoke representing the the Action Committee for the Defence of Freedom of Art and Expression (ACDAE), as the President thereof and also as a Political Committee member of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) of Sri Lanka.
The meeting was titled "Ahnaf Jazeem: 365 days & counting". Jayasekera spoke on the topic "Prevention of Terrorism Act & Unlawful Detention of Ahnaf Jazeem". The online Meeting was organized by "Minority Report".
***
Good Evening!
Almost four years before, when poet Ahnaf Jazeem launched his first anthology of poetry, Navarasam, at a grand a ceremony held in his village school, attended to by many 'distinguished' guests and poetry lovers, our poet could never have had even a fancy of a dream that he would have to perish the prime years of his youth in a prison cell, just because of the same well-received work of art. Having written poetry advocating social harmony, peace, empathy and in praise of 'God', as a young aspiring poet of a poor rural family of a day labourer, it would have been his most innocent wish that he would be receiving much recognition and his literary work would be much appreciated by the society. At the time when Ahnaf was arrested by Sri Lanka Police on 16 May 2020 at his home, upon an allegation of propogating Muslim extremism, which he could never have thought of, handcuffed and put in a police jeep along with all remaining copies of his poetry book and other books from his shelf, and carried to Colombo in a dark evening, he should have deeply felt that all these hopes were evaporating.
 |
| Jayasekera addressing the meeting |
When Ahnaf was unlawfully arrested, Sri Lanka police Conter-Terrorism and Investigation Division (well known as TID), initially alleged that he was suspected of having "published books on and taught his students ‘extremism’ and 'racism". He was unlawfully detained and is continuously put under TID custody, based upon purported detention orders, the validity of which we have challenged in Courts. One month after his arrest, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) reported facts against the Poet to Fort Magistrate Court on the same allegations. After having obtained a damning scientific report from psychiatrists upon this literary work, since 03 March this year, the CID has expressly concluded its proceedings against the poet in that case.
The TID initiated its case against Ahnaf on 11 December last year, in the Chief Magistrate Court of Colombo. TID cites several provisions of two infamous legislations - the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) No.48 of 1979 and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) Act No.56 of 2007 - in reporting facts against Ahnaf and alleging that Ahnaf, 'the suspect', has been involved in activities such as directing individuals to Muslim extremist terrorist activities, aiding and abetting them, and concealing such information from the security forces, obstructing reconciliation in Sri Lanka and engaging in activities that endanger public peace, and thereby commiting offenses under Sections 3 (a), (b), 5 (a), (b) of the PTA and under Section 3 (1) (2) of the ICCPR Act. Both these acts, the PTA and ICCPR Act, have been used throughout the past to silence and suppress dissent, writers and political opponents by succeeding governments.
This case was last called on the 2nd March, 2021, and the Court refused to hear the Defence on the basis that the TID has filed the case only for the limited purpose of facilitating the detainee to make a statement to the Court under Section 127 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which provides that "any magistrate may record any statement made to him at any time before the commencement of any inquiry or trial". Though we disagree with this legal position, the case is currently laid-by indefinitely, permitting the TID to make an application to Court by way of motion "when suitable circumstances are ready to produce the person to the Court".
Friends, we know that what the TID is now doing is preparing these "suitable circumstances" by ill-treating and imposing duress upon Ahnaf, treating him inhumanely and degradingly in various ways, to intimidate and force him to give the most self-incriminating statement admitting to a fact, which the TID already knows, as per the B-Report filed in the Magistrate Court. As per the B-report itself, it manifests that the TID wants the poet to admit that during his period of education at Jamia Nalimia Institute, a well-known prestigious Muslim academic institution, he was exposed to Muslim extremist ideologies, got interested in activities of ISIS terrorist organization and consequently resorted to extremist ideologies, which Ahnaf has continuously denied as false and reufused to admit. We also know that he is forced to admit that while working as a teacher, he taught students extremism, which too Ahnaf has denied as false.
We also know that the allegation that the poetry book Navarasam contains ideas promoting Muslim extremism or violence is flatly rejected as false by experts on Tamil language and literature.
These are all facts available before you all, which I have reasons to believe you all know well.
Like Public Security Ordinance and Emergency Regulations, the PTA is such a draconian piece of legislation always resorted to by Sri Lanka government to detain suspects, most viciously during and after the 26-year racist war against Tamil people, and significantly after the 2019 Easter Sunday terrorist attacks against the Muslim community of the country. According to Section 16 of the Act confessions made while in detention and during the investigation would be admissible during trial as evidence against a suspect, unless it is proved that the same was given under duress, which high burden falls upon the suspect. The PTA contains no express provision for Bail and once produced to Court under its Section 7, a detainee has to be sentenced till the conclusion of the trial against him. Ahnaf is not yet produced to Court under this Section. If Ahnaf is indicted upon these alleged offences under PTA and the ICCPR Act, and the same is proved against him, he faces the risk of being sentenced to a period between 5 to 20 years of imprisonment.
The Fundamental Rights (FR) application filed on behalf of Ahnaf is to be supported in the Supreme Court, when the conditions permit us so soon.
Friends, it is now very clear for us that the poet's arrest and continued detention are arbitrary and unlawful, because all allegations against him are unfounded, and there was no reasonable or probable cause for his arrest. We have pointed out in our Fundamental Rights (FR) Petition and in the Public Petition launched by the Action Committee for the Defence of Freedom of Art and Expression (ACDAE) that the poet's arrest and detention is an anti-democratic act, which infringes, among other rights, the poet's right to freedom of expression and art. The FR Petition specifically states that "the arrest of Poet Ahnaf Jazeem was motivated purely by extraneous political reasons and compulsions in order to capitalize on the Easter Sunday Attacks and to feed a vicious racist campaign against the citizens of the Mohammedan faith and thereby to divide and rule the people of the country".
Now the question before us is, how is Ahnaf's release ensured? Let me say that this question is adequately responded only if the causes and circumstances under which Ahnaf was arrested are properly analysed and understood. This analysis was presented only by the World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org), the official international publication of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
In an article published on 20 December 2020 in WSWS, unreservedly opposing Ahnaf's detention, the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), the Sri Lankan section of the ICFI, explained as follows:
"The Rajapakse government is deliberately promoting divisive communalism and anti-democratic attacks on writers as it confronts rising working-class struggles against its big business policies, its grossly inadequate response to the COVID-19 pandemic and moves towards a military-based presidential dictatorship."
The purpose of this hysterical anti-Muslim campaign endorsed by 'opposition' parties, the article explained, is " to divide and weaken the working class".
" Ahnaf, ...is the latest victim of the government’s anti-Muslim witchhunt," it explained.
In its statement published in the WSWS on 16 February (2021), calling the working people to rally around it to defend Ahnaf, ACDAE explained the circumstances under which this continued anti-Muslim witch-hunt is being waged:
"Faced with an unprecedented economic and political crisis, president [Gotabhaya] Rajapaksa, from the very inception, serving the interests of capitalist big business, was consolidating a presidential dictatorship, broadly based on the military. His government openly declared an economic war against the working class. The situation aggravated when in March last year the COVID-19 pandemic hit the island...
"In this backdrop, Rajapaksa government's witch-hunt against writers, journalists, social-media activists is, in a heightened form, a continuation of the policies of Sirisena-Wickremasinghe government, which re-initiated a deadly racist campaign against Muslims after the [Easter Sunday] terrorist attacks, supported by ultra-right Sinhala-Buddhist factions."
In the same manner, Rajapaksha government is continuing its racist witch-hunt against the Tamil community, strengthening its military occupation in the areas of North & East since the end of war, arresting youth and terrorizing local media and journalists, often quoting alleged national security threats. Last November, the Valachchenai Police arrested a journalist name Kokilan Thasan, also known as Gokulan, under regulations issued in 2011 under the PTA to proscribe the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE), on bogus allegations of promoting the LTTE and its slain leader. He is yet in remand for more than six months, without any formal charges being filed in Court.
Historically, racism has been an effective tool of capitalist class rule to divide and derail the working people from their united class struggles against capitalist rule, its austerity measures, and its anti-democratic and counter-revolutionary onslaught against the working people and the poor. Raising a national security threat issue allegedly posed by an ethnic community is the most vicious form of this racist campaign. It is this very tool that the Sirisena-Wickremasinghe government and now the Rajapaksha government have been utilizing against the Mulslim ethnic minority, attempting to cultivate Sinhala chauvinism against them.
Discrimination on the basis of race, religion, language or any other identity is the essential manifestation of government sponsered racist campaigns intended to divide the working class on ethnic and other identity lines to suppress united class struggles, especially at times of economic and political crises. Ethnic discrimination is therefore essentially a product of Capitalism and its class system.
This phenomena is not unique to the capitalist rule of Sri Lanka during the 73 year period since the formal transfer of power to local bourgeoisie by the British imperialism, which is celebrated by the ruling class every year as so called "independence". This is an international phenomenon. From the United States, Brazil, United Kingdom, Germany, France to India and in many other developing countries around world, what is daily observed is the militant working class struggles rising against governments' austerity measures, criminal and reckless responses to the global pandemic causing millions of deaths, against militarism and preparations for imperialist wars. On the other hand, governments around the world are consolidating authoritarianism and dictatorship to counter these class struggles.
These manifest the essential principle that democratic rights therefore are essentially incompatible with the parasitic capitalist profit system, its class system and unprecedented global inequality. Leon Trotsky, the co-leader of the great Russian Revolution, and the founder of the Fourth International, in his "Theory of Permanent Revolution" brilliantly explained this fact. He wrote, "[w]ith regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development" like those in South Asia, "the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation".
The fight against racism, ethnic discrimination, inequality, dictatorship and for democratic rights is therefore essentially bound up with the abolition of this parasitic profit system and oppressive class system by revolutionary struggles of the oppressed masses led by the working class.
Based on the above fundamental political understanding, it is only the Action Committee for the Defence of Freedom of Art and Expression (ACDAE), the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), and the World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org) that have unequivocally declared that Ahnaf is a political prisoner and his arrest and detention is fundamentally a political act, necessitating a political fight to defend him and democratic rights. ACDAE is waging a broad political campaign to defend Ahnaf and secure his release based on the political programme that Ahnaf's release is ensured only by a broad and united political fight against these arrests and assault on democratic rights by the working class of the island and internationally, cutting across all ethnic or racial divisions, rallying youth, artists, intellectuals and all those who value democratic rights around them, based on the programme of international socialism.
The Online Public Petition launched by ACDAE to mobilize the masses around that political perspective and demand Ahnaf's immediate release, dropping of all criminal proceedings against him and full compensation for the suffering caused to him, has gained much public support within advanced sections of the urban working class and the intelligentia and this campaign needs to reach a broader sections of the masses.
ACDAE was established in August 2019 as part of ICFI's international perspective and SEP's principled fight to defend freedom of expression of the working class, freedom of journalism and other democratic rights, to rally broad mass support for the demand of the freedom of writer Shakthika Sathkumara, who was anti-democratically arrested for posting a short story in his Facebook account and remanded for four months to satisfy the racist Sinhala-Buddhist factions. His release was secured in the backdrop of international public campaign initiated and propagated by the Action Committee.
Even one year after his unlawful arrest and detention, the TID has not concluded their so-called investigation and no indictectment has been filed against him. They use methods of intimidation, as usual, in an attempt to extract forced confessions from him, to prove their concocted case against the poet. The ACDAE demands the immediate release of Ahnaf and all other political prisoners including journalists and social media activists such as Gokulan, and immediate cessation of all unlawful criminal proceedings against them.
Friends, while thanking all those who have supported the Public Petition and its perspective and urging you all to encourage your contacts to do the same and issue protest statements, I call upon all those attending this meeting to join the Action Committee, build its branches at your localities, and wage our fight forward for the Defence of democratic rights. I also urge, most importantly, the necessity to be politically educated and therefore request from you all to study the programme and the perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International, daily read the World Socialist Web Site and join the fight for international socialism.
Thank you!