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ජවිපෙ මන්ත්රීකම් අහිමි කිරීම
Victor Ivan
Ravaya
Three notes. The President has asked her lawyers whether JVP MPs can be unseated for breaching alliance discipline, though the government, with JVP support, has used the Chief Justice to protect MPs who crossed to it; whispers of a third impeachment motion against the Chief Justice; and a bouquet for
A reply to Sumanasiri, who holds that Marx the philosopher is not dead. Ivan grants that the world Marx hoped for is more beautiful than liberal democracy, but separates the philosopher from the politician. Drawing on Dmitri Volkogonov's biographies of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, drawn from the opened Soviet archives,
Must the next presidential election be held at the end of this year, as Ranil Wickremesinghe says, or next year, as the President says? The dispute arises from her two swearings-in, publicly in 1999 and secretly in 2000. The editorial traces the tangle to the Chief Justice and notes that
Sri Lanka's democracy is more feudal than bourgeois: voters choose parties not for policies but because 'our party will look after us', and are rewarded with privileges when it wins. The editorial calls this corrupt system a cause of the country's misfortune and a barrier to civil society.
The President has cleared a hard hurdle. Allying with the JVP let her defeat the UNP 'army' that had surrounded her, but left her a prisoner of the JVP; with the JVP gone she now has two paths, and the editorial argues that a parliamentary election would hurt the JVP
The Sunday Lakbima's front page announced that a Sangha decree would expel the President from Buddhism, and its editor-in-chief Sundara Nihathamani de Mel had to answer for it. Ivan compares Gandhi's model of satyagraha with the Sri Lankan version, and weighs a ruler's right to decide against the need to
The JVP could no longer stay in the alliance because of a public statement based on a wrong calculation, made while competing at once with the SLFP and the Hela Urumaya. The piece follows the monks' fast against the joint mechanism, the Treasury Secretary's role, and the President's meeting with
With the JVP gone, the government has no majority. The forces gathered around the alliance had no vision beyond defeating the UNP, the parties have no internal democracy and train autocrats, and although an election is near, the Elections Commission has still not been set up.
The joint mechanism is splitting the country in two. Its opponents say it gives a terrorist group formal recognition; the editorial answers that 60 per cent of the damage was in the North-East, and that those who stand for peace have as much right to be heard as those who
The JVP's dream of power was really one Mangala Samaraweera built for it, with a crown for himself in the interval after the President. Now the joint mechanism leaves the party a choice between looking foolish in government and leaving it; Ivan points to India, with a Sikh prime minister
Three notes. Mangala Samaraweera, who brought the President and the JVP together and taught the JVP that it could capture the SLFP after Chandrika, now faces the collapse of his work; the Hela Urumaya's crocodile tears for Major Muthaliff; and the Lankadeepa editor Siri Ranasinghe's apology to the Supreme Court
At the donor conference in Kandy the President promised to sign the joint tsunami mechanism with the LTTE despite pressure from extremists. For the JVP it has become a question of survival, while neither the President nor Ranil Wickremesinghe will trust the other; the editorial warns that no option will
The ceasefire created good conditions for a peaceful settlement, but the country failed to use them and is now being pushed towards settling matters by war. The alliance never had one view of the conflict, and the editorial warns that starting a war is easy but will bring only destruction.
The Joint Mechanism and the Coming Political Crisis
Victor Ivan
Business Today
Having promised the Kandy aid conference she would sign the joint mechanism for tsunami relief in the north-east regardless of extremist pressure, the President has been called. The JVP, under internal pressure that has made the issue one of survival and dignity, has resolved to quit the government if she
However venomous the President's attack in her television interview of 16 May, the JVP has not struck back, because she holds two fatal weapons: the power to dissolve Parliament and the power to look into JVP leaders' assets. Sections follow on the President's trump cards, the Chief Justice and religion,
Businessmen close to the government have begun using the tsunami to seize thousands of acres of valuable coastal land, confirming suspicions raised when the buffer zone was declared without reason. The editorial is not against foreign investment, but calls on informed citizens to force the government to abandon the scheme.
The Human Rights Committee's ruling against Sri Lanka over the one-year sentence imposed on Tony Fernando shows how the Supreme Court's high-handed policy flouted law and natural justice. A Chief Justice with any shame would resign; Ivan notes that the fourteen-member committee included India's P.N. Bhagwati.
A Royal College teacher's admission of her child on a false birth certificate has filled the papers. The editorial agrees that forgery is a serious offence but notes that it has become normal in the race for school places, and argues for reorganising the school system rather than hunting down
The alliance can no longer go on without resolving the conflicts between the JVP and the SLFP. Once the government's shining star, the JVP took the heaviest blow yet when the President attacked it in a television interview on the 16th, and it is now too weak to satisfy her.
Ranil Wickremesinghe's 54-page booklet on politics and the Dhamma was launched with great ceremony. The note compares the thin record of books by Sri Lankan leaders, J.R. Jayewardene's included, with India's tradition from Gandhi onwards, and links that emptiness to the emptiness of the country's politics.
