The "Che Guevarist" Uprising

Guerrilla fighting broke out in Ceylon last week and quickly engulfed much of the island. The rebels were members of a Maoist organization called the People's Liberation Front. Their target was the strongly leftist government of Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike, which is not leftist enough for their tastes.

The harshness of Mrs. Bandaranaike's response showed how seriously she regarded the threat. She adjourned Parliament, ordered a 24-hour curfew and sent out her 13,000-man police force and 11,000-man army to crush the uprising. Armored units swept the road between Colombo and Kandy, and air force planes bombed a bridge and textile factory that rebels were holding.

Mrs. Bandaranaike referred to the guerrillas last week as "Che Guevarists," tactfully refraining from any reference to the Chinese, on whom she depends for aid. In reality, the Liberation Front is a Maoist terrorist organization similar to the Naxalite movement of India's West Bengal state. Its 2,000 fighting members, many of whom belong to Ceylon's educated rural elite, grew to 70,000 or more in last week's fighting and outnumbered the armed forces by at least 3 to 1. The Prime Minister at one point went on radio "as a woman and as a mother" to appeal to parents to dissuade their sons from joining the rebels.

Members of the Liberation Front charged that Mrs. Bandaranaike had failed to introduce socialism rapidly enough since she began her second tenure as Prime Minister last May. But their basic complaint--and the reason they attracted so much support--was the island's high unemployment and inflation. Some skeptics believed that Mrs. Bandaranaike, acutely aware that she had failed to solve Ceylon's economic problems, had precipitated a crisis in order to silence a group that might develop into a strong opposition. But as the fighting intensified, it seemed clear that the threat to Mrs. Bandaranaike's government was too real to have been invented.

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