Upali Cooray, a Sri Lankan Trotskyist and tireless social activist,
died in London on August 21, 2009. He had just recovered from a
dangerous Streptococcus Pneumonia infection but started to have
difficulty breathing and was taken to the hospital on August 20. He
died the next morning. He was cremated after a funeral service in
London on September 3. His coffin was draped with a red flag bearing
the hammer and sickle emblem.

Born in Sri Lanka in 1939, Upali joined the Youth League of the Lanka
Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) while still a student. After completing his
education he taught at Karandeniya Central School in Galle. In those
days the LSSP was a mass-based Trotskyist party which fought hard
against the anti-Tamil policies that were being fostered by the MEP
coalition government, which had been swept into power in 1956 on the
rising tide of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism.

Within a few years, however, the LSSP tired of swimming against the
tide, and in 1964 a majority of the party voted to seek a coalition
government with Mrs. Bandaranaike at the head. Upali supported the
revolutionary Trotskyist faction of the LSSP, led by Edmund
Samarakkody, Bala Tampoe, V. Karalasingham, and Meryl Fernando, which
split and formed the LSSP (Revolutionary). Upali was elected to the
central committee of the new party. But this group proved to be
unstable, due to political differences, not to mention personal
rivalries, among the leaders. The LSSP (Revolutionary) soon
splintered.

Upali emigrated to Britain, entered the London School of Economics,
and joined the International Marxist Group (IMG), the British Section
of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. He became
secretary of Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. He eventually earned a BSc
in Economics and LLB from the London University and MA in Business Law
at London Guildhall University. He was called to the bar at Middle
Temple in 1974.

In 1971 the radical Sinhalese JVP staged an ill-starred uprising
against the coalition government. The LSSP and Communists supported
the vicious police repression of the youth. Upali went on an
international tour to campaign for the release of 80,000 political
prisoners held in detention in the aftermath of the failed JVP
insurrection of April 1971. He was arrested and detained by the police
in Sri Lanka in 1972 for these activities.

In 1975 Upali returned to Sri Lanka and joined the Revolutionary
Marxist Party, the Sri Lankan section of the United Secretariat of the
Fourth International, which was led by Bala Tampoe. He worked closely
with leading activists of Tampoe’s Ceylon Mercantile Union. In Colombo
he established a legal practice but devoted his services solely to
trade unions and workers.

Faced with the rising tide of Sinhalese chauvinism, Upali defended the
principle of self-determination for the Tamil minority in the North
and East of the island. In July 1979 he was a founding member of the
Movement for Inter-racial Justice and Equality (MIRJE). He co-authored
the first MIRJE publication, Emergency ’79, which was the first
publication to expose the atrocities in Jaffna that began on the first
night of the Emergency rule.

In 1983, during the “Black July” pogrom against the Tamil people in
the south, he courageously protected individual Tamils from attacks by
Sinhalese thugs. When the Jayawardena government enacted repressive
laws to crush the Tamil separatist movement and the trade unions,
Upali actively defended the rights of the Tamil people and workers’
rights. He always fought the cases that others would not touch. He was
known for defending the rights of workers, the poor, and the
victimized in immigration, employment, criminal, housing, and family
cases.

Upali also was an ardent champion of equal rights for women. He
initiated alternative institutions to organise and educate women
workers in the Katunayaka Free Trade Zone. He set up a Women’s Centre
and a Legal Advice Centre and helped to publish ’Da Bindu’ and
’Nirmani’ to raise awareness of women’s issues. He set up a Resource
Centre in Balangoda as a meeting place for tea plantation workers. For
these activities he was jailed for six months. He also initiated
Janahanda and Venasa, Sinhala language newspapers to counter
capitalist media, war mongering and anti-Tamil propaganda in the
Sinhala media. He wrote a series of booklets to explain legal jargon
in simple language for the benefit of worker activists.

In the late 1980s Upali returned to Britain, where he continued to
campaign against disappearances and assassinations during the reign of
terror in Sri Lanka. In 1988 he formed the Committee for Democracy and
Justice in Sri Lanka. He opposed both state-sponsored violence and the
terrorism of the Liberation Tigers.

Upali looked for ways to build bridges to the splintered and
marginalized remnants of the Old Left in Sri Lanka. He renewed his
contacts with old comrades, including Edmund Samarakkody, Hector
Abhayavardhana, Osmund Jayaratne, Prins Rajasooriya, and N.
Sanmugathasan. Upali thought the Left in Sri Lanka had reached a dead
end and had to return to its roots. In an open letter to his grandson
he wrote: “we must build a new and a bold movement that could unite
all those who have been exploited, disadvantaged and marginalized.
Like the Suriya Mal Movement and the LSSP, which spearheaded the fight
against caste oppression and British imperialism in the 1930’s, today
we need a new movement to spearhead the struggle for modernity and to
drag our country from the economic and political quagmire that the
failed prophets of the yester years have led us into. Unfortunately,
the LSSP lost its clout and its mass base by entering into an
opportunist alliance with the SLFP. We must learn the lessons of that
debacle and make sure that the poor and the oppressed will always
maintain its political and organizational independence.”