ඇත්ත ඇති සැටියෙන් දැකීම
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 not be asked to do. He closes on a
comparison few make — the caste composition of those killed by Wijeweera’s followers and by
Prabhakaran’s, and of those killed by the forces suppressing both.
මහින්ද කොයිබටද?
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 Sri Lankan state is better and fairer than
life in his separate one. A great leader is not satisfied with half a greatness.
17 වැනි සංශෝධනය හා මැතිවරණ කොමිසම
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 — and argues that an
amendment bolted on to a constitution built around an unaccountable president was never
going to hold.
දෙමළ කැරැල්ලක් ආවේ ඇයි? සිංහලයින් ද ආපසු හැරී බැලිය යුතුය
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 promised parity in Jaffna and the backlash swept both major parties into
Sinhala Only — through Bandaranaike’s twenty-four-hour pledge, the fast of F.R. Jayasuriya,
the unimplemented Tamil Language Act and standardisation.
දෙමළ සංහාරය ඇත්තක්ද?
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 perhaps fifteen thousand. He questions the figure of 850,000 Tamils abroad as
evidence of extermination, and notes that fewer than a fifth of the country’s Tamils ever
lived under LTTE rule.
දුම්රිය ගමන හා වේගය
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
shortened rather than extended it; nine hundred level crossings on a thousand kilometres of
track are what hold the trains back. He recalls Lalith Athulathmudali’s expressway joining
Hambantota to Jaffna, and finds the same instinct in the Yal Devi announcement.
කර්තෘ සංසදයේ ආචාර ධර්ම හා පුවත්පත් පැමිණිලි කොමිසම
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 own code go unreviewed. If neither the public it
protects nor the industry that made it believes in it, Beales asks, what future can it have?
සාකච්ඡා කිරීම හා සටන් කිරීම
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 raid on the Ravaya office five days after he declined President Premadasa’s
invitation, and the meetings with Chandrika Kumaratunga after attacks on journalists.
Journalists, he argues, should be able to telephone anyone in the country; the fault lies
only in misusing the connection.
ව්යවස්ථා සභාව, උයන්ගොඩ හා විග්නේෂ්වරම්
The Jathika Hela Urumaya objects to Jayadeva Uyangoda’s nomination to the Constitutional
Council because he once served a twelve-year sentence, and the prime minister to C.V.
Wigneswaran’s. Ivan answers that the 1977 government repealed the law Uyangoda was sentenced
under and gazetted that it should not follow him, that Gandhi, Mandela and D.S. Senanayake
were all imprisoned men, and that being Tamil does not make a retired Supreme Court judge a
separatist. The deeper fault, he argues, is a constitution written to place the president
above itself.
පෞද්ගලික වෛද්ය විද්යාල ප්රශ්නය ගැන වැඩිදුරටත්
Replying to a Peradeniya medical student who objected to his earlier column, Ivan asks why
selling medical services is acceptable if selling medical education is not, and sets World
Health Organization figures for doctors, nurses and pharmacists per ten thousand people
against those of Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Korea and Europe. Two per cent of Sri Lankan
children who start school reach a degree, against forty in Korea; the state holds a monopoly
on universities it cannot fund, and twenty-two billion rupees a year leaves the country with
the students it turns away.