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ගියරය වෙනස් කිරීමට කාලය පැමිණ තිබේ
Victor Ivan
Ravaya
The war for territory is won, and Ivan argues the country must now change the voice it speaks in. A degree of defiance suited a government fighting against international obstruction; facing a humanitarian problem of this size and needing the aid to solve it, the same tone will not do.
With six square kilometres left and under one per cent of the objective outstanding, Ivan argues there is no case for haste. The decision to stop air and artillery attacks and free the remaining civilians with light weapons is the right one and should not be misread as abandoning the
The Western Province result leaves the government stronger after three years than when it began, the UNP down from 39 seats to 30 and the JVP from 22 to three. Ivan argues that the moment to press for a change in the political system is precisely when the opposition cannot
Provincial elections are being held without the Elections Commission the 17th Amendment promised. Ivan recalls Ranil Wickremesinghe's conduct on the Constitutional Council, including his objection to Justice K.M.M.B. Kulatunga, compares India's Election Commission, and argues that the amendment's authors did not understand the presidential system it had to work within.
The elections commissioner has asked voters not to vote for candidates accused of thuggery and corruption, and Ivan asks how they are supposed to know who those are. India requires every nomination to carry a sworn statement of assets and of cases pending; Sri Lanka has an assets law that
Ivan answers two replies to his article on the genocide claim, apologises for having left a professor unnamed, and turns to what international law actually says: who counts as a combatant, what carpet bombing forbids, which three rights survive an emergency, and what the International Criminal Court could and could
Whether by luck, practical sense or sheer resolve, Ivan writes, Mahinda Rajapaksa will enter history as the leader who turned modern Sri Lankan politics. But defeating Prabhakaran militarily is not enough: he must be defeated politically as well, which means bringing the country's Tamils to accept that life within the
The price of defeating the LTTE is not yet countable, Ivan writes, but the harder question is what follows: how to heal a community that has paid an enormous forfeit and now carries a defeated mind. The Tamils hold an old language and an old civilisation, and cannot be governed
Provincial elections are being held without the Elections Commission the 17th Amendment requires, because Chandrika Kumaratunga refused to appoint one and the refusal has outlived her. Ivan sets the Indian Election Commission against it — its own budget, its own quasi-judicial powers, 668 million voters and 800,000 polling stations —
Ivan notes that if Ranil Wickremesinghe's complaint is Mahinda Rajapaksa rather than the system, then removing the man and preserving the machine is the wrong remedy — and that his promise to abolish the executive presidency under a UNP government reads as a concession to his party rather than a
Having asked where the Tamil struggle went wrong, Ivan turns the question on his own community. He puts the direct cost of the war to 1998 alone at 423 billion rupees and traces the language question from the cross-party agreement of the early fifties — broken when Sir John Kotelawala
The war is over and what it has left is harder than what it settled: one community in the country now feels itself defeated, and the Tamil diaspora with it. Ivan points to the Khalistan insurgency, put down in the mid-eighties and followed quickly enough by political redress that a
With the LTTE's territory gone and its leaders holding civilians as a shield, Ivan writes that the rules of war require a defeated side to surrender — Hitler's suicide was a signal to his army to do so — and that Prabhakaran has chosen instead to maximise the harm to
Against the claim that the war is a genocide, Ivan sets the arithmetic of the three armed rebellions the forces have put down. The second JVP insurrection lasted two years and five months and cost at least fifty thousand lives; the Fourth Eelam War has run three months longer for
A commuter's letter about the two and a half hours from Galle to Colombo sends Ivan through the history of travelling speed, from the ox cart at eight miles an hour to trains that now exceed three hundred. Sri Lanka had the best railway in colonial Asia and has since
Ivan reads the decision to restore the Yal Devi line to the north as symbolic as much as economic, and proposes that the sleepers be paid for village by village — each temple, church, school and workshop buying one marked with its name — so that the south has a
Ranil Wickremesinghe has now put down the third revolt against him, and Ivan explains why he was always going to. The party constitution gives its leader the same absolute power Sirimavo Bandaranaike used to survive seventeen years out of office — though it cost her the premiership when the party
Reading Ian Beales's review in the Press Complaints Commission's 2007 annual report, Ivan sets out a verdict the industry has not answered: four years on, self-regulation stands still, complaints are few and weak, the newspapers themselves are divided over whether they want it, and the Editors' Guild has let its
Ivan argues that the UNP's decline is not Ranil Wickremesinghe's doing but the working of the system the party itself built: J.R. Jayewardene designed a machine that would not change hands, and since 1994 it has kept his party out for fifteen years. Party constitutions mirror the national one —
Accused at a public forum of helping the government's war, Ivan answers by setting out thirty years of his own dealings with power: the twenty-odd statements he has given the CID, the night J.R. Jayewardene ordered him to drop a column and the month he obeyed before resuming it, the
