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අධිකරණය ජනමාධ්ය හා සමාජ-දේශපාලන යථාර්ථය
Victor Ivan
Ravaya
Uvindu Kurukulasuriya, once a freelance writer for Ravaya, questioned Ivan's present silence on the burning questions of the judiciary in an article for the Sunday Leader on the 17th. He opened with something that interests the public: that the president, minister Basil Rajapaksa and the prime minister attended a reception
Political outlook is an important factor in whether political struggles bear fruit. Ivan is not a Marxist, and he accepts the idea that theory guides practice: there are political struggles in this country and they happen without a meaningful forward vision, and that is why the fighters have become people
When the JVP member Anura Kumara Dissanayake tried to make a statement in parliament about the hedging agreement, the government whip's objection turned it into a point of order for the Speaker to rule on. Ivan answers it with a precedent: the debate in the State Council, at the end
The British commercial high court has ruled that the Petroleum Corporation must pay Standard Chartered the 162 million dollars due under the hedging agreement, with interest. The bank went to that court rather than to an arbitration panel, probably meaning the judgment to affect the other banks party to the
What Ivan sets out to analyse here is the moral crisis facing a society that has to live crushed between the two naked powers of an armed struggle for state power, when both sides stand level with each other — and specifically how that worked on the Sinhala society of
The article opens by correcting two printing errors in the first part, published in the previous issue: Che, not 'me', was killed after being taken into custody, and the number of LTTE cadres in detention should have read more than ten thousand rather than more than a thousand. What follows
The Sunday Times has reported that the government intends to sell the 500-acre island being built in the sea off Galle Face to a Chinese investor for 700 million dollars, and that it means to remove the 100 per cent tax now charged when land is sold to foreign investors
Sri Lanka appears to be tangling its problems further instead of settling them. It was the support of neighbouring India that let the war against Prabhakaran be carried to victory over the obstruction of the Western powers, and in return Sri Lanka appears to have given India various promises —
The government won its war against Prabhakaran in an astonishing way. What it failed to do was to understand in advance that after that victory it would have to fight a more complicated propaganda war against the diaspora friendly to him, and that failing in that war could cost it
A great tangle is being made again over the 13th amendment. After the war ended the president assured India and the world that the amendment plus one thing more would be implemented — and that assurance, given publicly and loudly enough for the whole country to hear, was what India
On one side there is a great agitation for a pay rise fit for the self-respect of university teachers. On the other the programme of sending newly admitted students to army camps for leadership training has caused heated argument; the first group has finished and the training of the second
According to reports in the press and on television, what has caused the kidney disease among the people of Rajarata is arsenic in the water, put there by agricultural chemicals — and the arsenic problem has grown so large that there is arsenic in the rice we eat. The discovery
The documentary Sri Lanka's Killing Fields, shown on Channel 4 on the 14th, has shaken not only foreigners who watched it but the Sri Lankan diaspora of both communities. Letting this question fester is very bad: it does enormous damage to Sri Lanka's standing and puts Sri Lankans living in
A fundamental change in the political system is essential to any good forward movement for the society and the country — and without overcoming the challenge Prabhakaran's movement posed to the state, there was no possibility of making one. That challenge was itself something this corrupt political system enlarged: there
The war is over and some social and political quarrels remain unsettled, and there is no sign of an approach wise enough to settle them. The proposed pension scheme for private sector employees is one that creates needless problems: the fund is to be built from what belongs individually to
The threat to the fish market from the extortionists was overcome by a policy of using force against them to the maximum, and for that problem the approach was right — the fish traders approved it and so did the public. The article then asks what happens when the same
Ivan questioned one idea from Dr Sunil Wijesiriwardena's interview, not to put him in difficulty but because he believed it would put a wrong view into a reader's head. The reply came, and this is Ivan's answer to the reply — which begins by noting that the reply insists repeatedly
The question of what political settlement should be given to the Tamil people of the north has again reached a state of feeling rather than of thought, and the joint statement issued by the Indian and Sri Lankan external affairs ministers has drawn heavy criticism in some quarters — with
The article on the moral decay among professionals brought a response good enough to satisfy him: one man he knows telephoned to say it was good enough to have muddled his head, another praised the approach while blaming him for stopping the Gandhi series in the middle, and a Tamil
Ivan wishes the newly appointed chief justice well — and records that he wished her predecessor well in the same way, expecting him to put right some part of the enormous damage Sarath N. Silva had done to the courts, and that it has to be said with regret that
