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පුවත්පත් මණ්ඩල ක්රමය නැවත ඇති කිරීම
Victor Ivan
Ravaya
The Press Council was left dormant in 2002 so that the industry could regulate itself, and is now being revived. Ivan sets out what is wrong with the law — registration of every owner and editor, renewable yearly — and what is wrong with the self-regulation that replaced it, and
The Jathika Hela Urumaya's ministers have said they will leave the government if police and land powers are devolved, and that the Tamil people's problems amount to food, clothing, shelter and social dignity. Ivan answers that the amendment's value is symbolic as much as practical, and that a country which
With the war won, the only voice still raised against the 13th Amendment is the JVP's — a party that once killed people for supporting provincial councils, then contested them, and is now trying to rise again through them. Ivan notes that the president promised to implement the amendment fully
Because the war ended with the whole LTTE leadership destroyed rather than with a remnant intact, Ivan argues, the movement lost both the capacity and the confidence to regroup — which is why Prabhakaran's death brought no violent reaction. He turns from there to what the peace should be used
The law requires every candidate to declare the assets and liabilities of themselves, their spouse and their children under eighteen, and the elections commissioner has the power to make nominations conditional on it. Ivan asks why he does not use it, and proposes that the declarations be published on the
Before the argument about what solution the Tamils are to be given, Ivan writes, comes the question of the displaced: three hundred thousand people to be housed and fed, with sanitation and water the immediate problem and disease the risk behind it. Everyone agrees on equal rights for all citizens
After a television programme used footage of Poddala Jayantha and Sunanda Deshapriya while alleging that some journalists were paid by the LTTE, Poddala came to Ivan and asked him to intervene. Ivan describes what he did, what the president said when the question was put to him, and why he
Continuing the previous week, Ivan asks what a review of Sarath N. Silva's judgments would find, and answers with the record of appointments, plunder of public property, the company he kept and the ambition to become head of state. He reports the meeting at which senior counsel advised Chandrika Kumaratunga
Ivan takes the president's promise that there will be no more room for separatism — and, importantly, for racism — as the right formula, since each feeds the other. The victory should produce humility rather than triumph, and the test of it is whether wrong opinions are defeated by argument
On the retirement of Sarath N. Silva, Ivan sets out the record: cases of relatives heard and relieved, enemies punished to the limit, orders issued to the executive and the legislature, and an injunction obtained against the Speaker through friendly counsel and a friendly bench to stop an impeachment reaching
Written after the LTTE's defeat in May 2009, the piece credits Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sarath Fonseka and Gotabhaya Rajapaksa with the victory and turns to what remains: uniting a people divided by race, religion and caste, and settling the ethnic question. Ivan blames the Tamil leaders who first proposed a separate
Twenty-nine of the forty-seven members of the Human Rights Council in Geneva voted with Sri Lanka and twelve against, which Ivan counts an important victory in the international argument. Some violation of rights is unavoidable in any war and more so against a terrorist movement; but the victory has created
Ivan calls the UN Secretary-General's remark to CNN — that he had never seen camps as bad anywhere — a bad statement, and notes that the Swedish opposition leader who visited the same day was far less harsh. Housing three hundred thousand people is neither simple nor quick; the camps
A movement that held a large part of the country by force for close to three decades has been destroyed, and Ivan writes that in every one of the three armed rebellions the state has put down, the enemy was its own citizens. What the country owes itself now is
Judging by the weapons taken and the infrastructure found, Ivan writes, another decade of the LTTE would have been past imagining — and both the wars and the peace talks had strengthened its de facto state rather than dissolving it. Mahinda Rajapaksa is therefore the greatest of the country's leaders
Prabhakaran's organisation was thought unbeatable and fell like a great tree. Ivan argues that had he accepted defeat as Hitler did — taking his own life to release his followers — the war could have ended without harm to the civilians, and that instead he made them his shield. Setting
Ivan returns to Bhashana, who reads the war as a long-planned extermination on the model of Hitler's and Rwanda's, and notes that in all his writing since leaving the JVP for the LTTE's cause there is not one criticism of the LTTE. He sets the 730 days of Wijeweera's rebellion,
The government won the war for territory and lost the argument about how it ended. Ivan credits it with everything the military victory required — rebuilding the forces' morale, ending the factionalism among them, holding to the decision under international pressure — and finds the same government without a case
The government fought the war as a single-handed act and attacked the opposition through it; the opposition worked to obstruct the war, likened it to Hitler's, and sought to cut off aid. Ivan traces the habit to the system J.R. Jayewardene built to keep an opposition permanently out of power,
