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සියලු විරුද්ධ පක්ෂ තුළ සාධාරණ සැකයක්
Victor Ivan
Ravaya
The editorial says the People's Alliance's presidential victory is doubted by all opposition parties. It cites PAFFREL reports of ballot snatching and the expulsion of opposition polling agents, contrasts the silence of the acting Elections Commissioner, an outsider appointed without electoral experience, with the annulments made after the North Western
Ivan analyses Chandrika Kumaratunga's re-election, which he judges not entirely clean but not overturned by the malpractice in seats such as Hanguranketa and Dambulla. The LTTE bomb at her final rally swung sympathy her way and the anger at Prabhakaran fell on Ranil Wickremesinghe, yet her share of the vote
President Kumaratunga is drifting towards a political abyss from which there will be no easy return. She did not come to power through commitment, experience or ability but through good fortune, and she became president at a moment when she had been hoping only to become an MP.
The SLMC leader told the President that winning a corrupt election would blemish not only her but her children, and that losing a free one would be more honourable. She assured him there would be a clean election. This column sets that assurance against what was being arranged in the
If there is a country anywhere in the world where a dictatorial ruler is elected by popular vote, it must be Sri Lanka. J.R. Jayewardene built the system by discarding every sensible feature of the American and French models and keeping only the diabolical ones — after which he said
Under section 16 of the Presidential Elections Act, only the candidate, the person who nominates him and one other may come to the place where the Commissioner receives nominations. What happened at this nomination, and who was standing where, is the subject of the column.
If Prabhakaran can reverse in seventy-two hours what forty thousand men gained in thirty-three months, and if society still cannot see after that experience that there is no military solution to the ethnic problem, then the day a separate state is established in the North-East cannot be far away.
The President has gone for a snap election before her term expires, hoping to win it and then to convert that into a bigger parliamentary majority. The hope depends on the first hurdle, and the first hurdle depends on the Tamil vote — which this column counts constituency by constituency.
Many observers knew the President had plans for a snap presidential election; most were still caught unawares when she proclaimed one and shelved the November budget. What follows is a reading of the arithmetic she is betting on, party by party and vote by vote.
The leaders of the People's Alliance mean to stay in power for at least one more term whatever the people think of it. Consent and democratic principle are laughable matters to them: the feeling is that if the UNP held power for seventeen years, they are owed a minimum of
Why did the President, against every accepted norm of morality, appoint Sarath N. Silva to the vacant post of Chief Justice at a time when very serious allegations against him were being inquired into before the Supreme Court? And how will that act work on society and on politics?
After reports that most members of the legislature break the assets declaration rule they enacted themselves, the President has ordered every cabinet and deputy minister to hand over five years of declarations at once. Enforcing the law late, and only because a newspaper pressed, still deserves praise.
Dishonourable acts taint an ‘honourable’ judicial service
Victor Ivan
The Sunday Times
The questions raised about the Judicial Service by the conduct of Magistrate Lenin Ratnayake, District Judge Upali Abeyratne and Attorney General Sarath N. Silva — three men at three different levels of it — are serious indeed.
The PA government is pushing itself towards political extinction for the sake of a film actor. The disrepute the Channel 9 scandal has brought on the government and on the President who leads it is great, and the story shows how much weight men like Sanath Gunatilleke, who gate-crashed into
The telephone was once a status symbol; now it is how people talk, and the computer and e-mail will follow it into every house. In a country facing a real threat to national security, the intelligence service is reportedly being used to listen to political gossip rather than to investigate
Power has been understood since Aristotle as divisible into three — legislative, executive, judicial. Sri Lanka's recent judicial history holds tragic instances of judges bending to the narrow political interests of government leaders, and famous instances of judges standing up to them. This column is about which way the office
Neelan Tiruchelvam, one of the main authors of the government's devolution package, was assassinated just as the constitutional amendment carrying it was being brought before parliament ahead of a snap presidential election. The LTTE is plainly responsible — and what Ivan examines is what the government did to make the
Ivan lists the 27 defamation suits brought against Ravaya in its first six years and recounts three: a Minister's criminal case heard before a partial judge, Attorney General Thilak Marapone's indictment in the W.A.K. Silva affair after a Bribery Commissioner was removed, and an ex parte suit served to the
This article delivers a scathing critique of "crony capitalism" in Sri Lanka, a deeply entrenched system of state plunder initiated under former President J.R. Jayewardene. The author expresses profound disillusionment with the newly elected People's Alliance government, arguing that instead of dismantling this corrupt network and recovering stolen national wealth,
An open letter congratulating President Chandrika Kumaratunga on a victory won across all communities. Ivan urges her to settle the ethnic question and to recover what the old regime's cronies took, naming the Nawaloka land payment, the Airbus deal and the Ruhunu Cement sale, and warns that wolves cannot be
