Writing from Australia is Lionel Bopage. Mentioning that he served as secretary of Sri Lanka's JVP once, he writes to congratulate a man who heads a trade union at home for a phenomenal 60 years.
This veteran's name is Bala Tampoe and the Ceylon Mercantile Union (CMU) was formed in 1928.
Lionel Bopage sent his words in "A Fraternal Message to Comrade Bala Tampoe and the Ceylon Mercantile Union" on February 12th, 2008. This extract candidly sets out his fraternity interest:
"I was pleased to report from my recent conversations with comrade Bala that he has not changed his political views one bit. He maintains his red credentials despite many of his erstwhile colleagues joining the ranks or supporting the ruling elite. He is the driving force influencing the CMU to take just and fair stands with regard to many national political issues... Yet, with capitalism in its globalisation phase adopting neo-liberal strategies and tactics for its global domination, it is necessary that organisations like the CMU and leaders like comrade Bala take a long and hard look regarding the practice, organisation and delegation of work.'
"In any organisation succession is vital for its vitality. Young cadres need to take over leadership roles. Comrade Bala can play a vital role in this. Given his sixty years of experience at the helm, he can impart his skills experience and radical political fidelity to the younger generation while the younger cadres can inject new blood, vigour and new ideas and thus prepare the CMU for the challenges of the 21st century globalised market economy." www.transcurrents.com/tamiliana/archives/536
The facts stun you. His comment tells you that Bala Tampoe, 80 years, leaves a succession crisis: he has not created leaders in the next generation or the suceeding one. You wonder, "What has he been doing with the CMU?" In contrast, Nelson Mandella desired no one-man-show.
You wonder whether the difference is that of the issue of 20 pieces of silver. Having a trade union constituency also means that Bala can become the man between employer and employee who could pick up silver on the other side too.
Would Bala want to hand over the second silver source to younger leaders? This is a perennial issue. It was seen in the infamous US trade union boss George Meany. Deeper, meaner politics than well-wisher Lionel Bopage glimpsed, may be involved.
Bala rose in times when trade unionists could pick up foreign silver through bedeviling governments that went for development through self-reliance. A classic case was that of the trade-union strike bedeviled S W R D Bandaranaike who was finally set aside in 1959 with a gun. This was characteristic punctuation by the ascendent US dollar as opposed to financial London that outsourced its geopolitics after the war.
So Bala may well be among recipients of pieces of silver stored by the USA of infamous State Secretary John Foster Dulles. That model served to propup JVP leader Rohana Wijeweera who used his pieces of silver to mobilise with leftist phrase in a few months, some 50,000 non-urban youths in the 1971 insurgency against the Bandaranaike widow's elected government. That goverment was bent on nationalising tea plantations that belonged to financial London.
Bala Tampoe had grown with people who studied in the UK and were influenced by Trotskyte academics in financial London to combat communist parties world-wide.
Another man who arose in "one-foot-in-the-bank" Trotskyte circles was Vasudeva Nanayakkara. He leads a party that he calls the Democratic Left Front. We hear the leftist phrase and its anti-Imperialist sub-slogans but then see in Vasudeva too the hallmark of the one-man-show that Lionel Bopage wants changed.
Yet, the twenty pieces of silver stand to be reckoned with obviously.
