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Will Prabhakaran take the peace path?
Victor Ivan
The Sunday Times
The LTTE and its leader are stuck in a quagmire and finding it hard to keep the violent struggle going. Whether Prabhakaran can take the path of peace, and what it would cost him to try, is the question — and Ivan's answer is neither hopeful nor hostile.
The government is reforming the whole legal system with a Rs. 1,400 million World Bank loan, but without telling the public or Parliament which laws are involved. The piece argues that the reforms serve business interests while ignoring workers, farmers, fundamental rights and good governance, and asks why the four
With the President barred from a third term, a cold war over the SLFP succession has begun, with S.B. Dissanayake, now party secretary and holder of several ministries, pushing aggressively ahead of Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake. The editorial surveys the pressures on the People's Alliance: a UNP strategy for an
The government is marking the anniversary of Vijaya Kumaratunga's assassination as a general commemoration of those killed by the JVP, with a costly travelling exhibition and fresh legal action against those involved in the second insurrection. Ivan's objection is not to the remembering.
Despite the President's circular limiting ministers to three vehicles, Planning Minister Pavithra Wanniarachchi uses fourteen, including seven kept from the Health Ministry, as does former Health Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva, so the new Health Minister borrows vehicles from the Labour Ministry. The piece also cites S.B. Dissanayake's granite in
A woman who dressed as the President, including her injured eye, in a UNP march had her Raddolugama house attacked. The editorial recalls earlier impersonations of Jayewardene and the Premadasas, cartoonists' caricatures and leaders' nicknames, notes that the government itself used the covered-eye photograph and caricatured Ranil Wickremesinghe as Dracula,
The UNP has withdrawn its petition against Kumaratunga's election, citing, through deputy leader Gamini Atukorale, Supreme Court rulings that limited evidence and demanded proof that it lost 1,230,258 votes to malpractice. Ivan shows by arithmetic that far fewer votes would have changed the result, or forced a second count since
The President told a conference of public officers that only 10 per cent of officials are efficient and that 25 to 30 per cent of development funds are lost to waste and corruption, implicitly blaming ministers too. The editorial replies that she chose the Cabinet, that political henchmen placed at
A profile of the actor Sanath Gunathilake after losing his post as the President's media adviser, a fall Ivan likens to the rupee's. He describes the vehicles, guards, free stays at the Galadari hotel and deference he once enjoyed, his habit of attaching himself to whoever held power from Gamini
The UNP has withdrawn its Supreme Court petition against the presidential election. What the deputy leader's statement shows is how deep the dissatisfaction in the main opposition party has become about the way things happen in that court.
Ivan catalogues the absurdities of government: the President's television pledge not to postpone local elections, contradicted by the news bulletin that followed; her claim that democratic freedom is complete as the International Press Institute put Sri Lanka on its watch list; Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake blaming democracy for the decline;
Welcoming the UNP's acceptance of the professionals' draft for four independent commissions, the editorial backs the Editors' Guild draft on freedom of information, Article 19's campaign and the Democratic Alliance's twelve demands. It traces unfulfilled pledges from the Premadasa era and the R.K.W. Goonesekere committee, and argues that a right
Ivan explains how the Public Trustee's Department holds charitable trusts and bequests worth hundreds of millions, then documents spending by the new Public Trustee, N.S.A.S. Seneviratne, whose past he had warned about: a pirith ceremony and air-conditioning from the D.B. Jayatilaka fund, a car bought from the Samarakoon dowry trust,
On the anniversary of Independence, Ivan argues that because Ceylon won freedom without struggle, its communities never forged a real national unity. Citing Lord Soulbury's foreword to B.H. Farmer's Ceylon: A Divided Nation, he notes that Section 29 did not stop the citizenship laws or the Sinhala Only Act, and
In a television interview the President denied an economic slide or real price rises and claimed a bank driver earns Rs. 60,000 while a minister gets Rs. 19,000. The editorial corrects her figures, noting ministers earn about Rs. 29,815 tax-free and that some have built mansions since 1994, reads her
Ivan examines the floating of the rupee and its fallout: importers ruined by paying at the new exchange rate for goods sold at the old, daily price rises, and likely shortages at the Sinhala New Year. He traces the drain on reserves to war purchases, duty-free vehicles and bulletproof BMWs
The fifty-third anniversary of independence falls today. The country was moving from feudalism to capitalism, and what was expected of independence was not freedom from colonialism — colonialism had produced only a modern nationalist state. National integration was the condition of real independence, and it was never met.
Answering a reader who asks why Ravaya keeps writing about Sarath N. Silva, Ivan retells how his suspicions began with the Lenin Ratnayake affair: the rape allegation reported in 1997, police findings that Ratnayake had been dismissed from the Insurance Corporation for fraud, and a confidential 1998 report in which
As prices soar, the government has used police against a JVP protest while fishermen strike and the UNP turns to agitation. The editorial blames poor governance rather than external factors, citing the flour subsidy before the 1994 election, misdirected Samurdhi payments, unmetered electricity users, lost port revenue after the President
The piece welcomes the decision to admit half of all Grade One pupils by computer lottery from January 2002. It describes how competition for popular schools has bred forged documents, a market in fake deeds and bribes to principals of up to Rs. 300,000 in Colombo, shutting out poor children,
