Dive into an archive of over 5,000+ published articles…
Archives: Articles
Against whom are the draconian laws?
Victor Ivan
The Sunday Times
The government has declared military rule with a parliamentary election due before the end of August. Conditions in the coming period may be worse than they are now, and the government still cannot, under any circumstances, refrain from holding the election.
The editorial traces a vicious cycle of ever larger crises from the 1958 riots, the 1971 insurrection and 1983 to the 1988–90 revolt, and says the country now stands at the threshold of a bigger one as the army faces decisive defeat in Jaffna. It weighs the fate of the
Ivan says Prabhakaran's offensive on Jaffna has evaporated the government's plans to extend Parliament or win an election through constitutional change. A defeat in Jaffna could topple the government; any election would exclude the North. He notes MPs' retrospective pay rise, doubts the new Sinhala nationalist party can offer a
Sri Lanka has become a country caught in a vicious circle of crises with no way out, and the special feature of that circle is that each crisis is bigger and more dangerous than the one before it. Five passages of this column were removed by the censor and stand
The editorial argues that Anton Balasingham's interview with the Tamil Guardian, setting out the LTTE's conditions for Norwegian-facilitated talks such as the Thimpu principles and a homeland, should be debated seriously rather than sensationalised by Lankadeepa and Divaina. It agrees that both the People's Alliance and the UNP view the
Ivan analyses the army's withdrawal from Elephant Pass, the gateway to the Jaffna peninsula, and argues that the capture of Jaffna without securing a land route was always a trap. With some fifty thousand troops and police now with nowhere to retreat, he expects Jaffna to fall to the LTTE,
The Army Commander says Elephant Pass was given up on strategic grounds. What the LTTE had in fact done was bring the base to a point where the army could not get water or food into it — and a base abandoned for strategic reasons still proves that the means
Ivan responds to the French ambassador's intervention in the dispute over the President's educational qualifications. He faults her for ignoring the President's office calling a questioning editor a 'worm', and uses The World of Learning directory and an OECD training inventory to argue that Sciences Po and the École des
With the French Ambassador entering the argument about the President's educational qualifications, the debate has gone beyond Sri Lanka. An explanation from someone in that position ought to be impartial, Ivan writes, and hers is not.
Ivan questions the appointment of businessman Harry Jayawardena, a close Bandaranaike family friend and 1994 campaign financier, to the Securities and Exchange Commission while facing customs fraud cases against Stassen Exports and inquiries over Hatton National Bank dealings. He also criticises the choice of Rienzie Arsecularatne as Director General of
As a nation we are on the edge of a great abyss, and the leaders behave like crabs dancing in water until it boils — so blinded by hunger for power that they cannot see the danger to themselves, let alone the danger to the country.
Harry Jayawardena, a billionaire businessman, a close friend of the Bandaranaike family and the man reported to have met the chief expenses of the presidential campaign, has been appointed to the Securities and Exchange Commission. What, Ivan asks, does an appointment like that tell the country about itself?
The PA government is locked in a dilemma there is no easy way out of. Even a very satisfactory result at the coming parliamentary election would leave it with fewer seats than it holds now, which is why the electoral system itself is what it wants to change.
Will the Ranil-Chandrika dialogue change the political picture? Will it produce even a consensus on the ethnic crisis that has gone on destroying life? Not, Ivan argues, while the hatred each side has cultivated for the other is the one thing both of them still hold in common.
Even after being elected to it, the President has several times called the executive presidency a dreadful cancer introduced into the body politic. By now proposing to keep that cancer to the end of her own term while reforming the constitution, she has turned the whole reform project into a
Norway has come forward as a facilitator to help Sri Lanka find a way out of the ethnic crisis. Will the Norwegian intervention lead to a solution? Ivan's answer turns on what both Sri Lankan leaders have already shown they will trade for Prabhakaran's neutrality.
When a ruling party acts undemocratically it falls to the official opposition to enlighten its members and the public and turn them into an active force against it. What happens when the opposition cannot or will not is the subject — and the case Ivan works from is the SLFP
There is no disgrace for an elephant who breaks his tusks on a diamond rock. Reading the reply the President's office sent to his answer to her January interview, Ivan writes, he felt they were living in an abuddassa age, in which the diamond rock pursues the elephant in anger
Making a constitution implies that the people of a country reach a consensus on the kind of government that suits them. In Sri Lanka it is being done behind their backs: they do not know what is proposed, and the document looks likely to reach them for discussion only after
The editorial notes that the 52nd independence anniversary arrives as fear of death returns, though ending that fear was a slogan of the 1991 impeachment movement and of the rulers now in power. It lists death threats, murders of local opposition activists, threats to journalists and rights activists, and attacks
