ජනමාධ්යවේදීහු සදාචාර අර්බුදයක
Journalists demand information from everyone and are scrutinised by no one, Ivan argues — and when their own affairs come into question, they close ranks. He notes that Ranil Wickremesinghe’s criticism of media conduct went undiscussed, that neither the Centre for Policy Alternatives nor Sunanda Deshapriya explained their dispute publicly, and that people inside the Free Media Movement asked him to help keep its internal investigation out of the press. He then publishes figures: two officers paid 750 euros a month by INSI for journalist safety, whose existence most journalists do not know of; a protection fund paying 5,000 rupees a month to five families of murdered journalists while paying rents of 230,000 and 178,000 to two threatened ones; trainers paid up to 38,400 rupees for a two-day workshop, who also act as coordinators and judge the essay competitions. Four journalists’ November payments are itemised, with monthly incomes reaching 326,530 rupees.
ගෝල්ඩන් කී අර්බුදය
Golden Key Credit Card’s failure to pay interest on time has brought depositors to its door and shaken the whole Ceylinco group. The Central Bank has removed Seylan Bank’s board and placed it temporarily under Bank of Ceylon control. Golden Key took deposits and paid 30 per cent annual interest without being a registered financial business — funding those returns, it appears, by lending depositors’ money to Ceylinco property companies, which collapsed with the property market. Ten thousand depositors are owed some 25 billion rupees; the company’s eye hospital, teak plantation and Kirimandala Mawatha land cannot be liquidated quickly and would not cover it anyway. Ivan notes the chief administrative officer’s monthly package of 6.5 million rupees and six luxury vehicles, and argues such payments are extortion rather than salary. He divides depositors into three kinds, the third being people whose money could not safely be placed in a lawful institution.
වඩා වැදගත් කවුද?
Ivan discovered on a Friday that most of Ravaya’s ten-member editorial board are Marxists of one school or another. From there he argues the case against: the socialist experiments that failed, Pol Pot’s regime killing people for wearing sunglasses, Wijeweera’s two attempts at armed seizure — and sets against them the India Gandhi made, the largest democracy on earth, beside which he thinks Marx looks small.
සමාජ අධ්යාත්මය ඝාතනය කරනු ලැබුවෝ කවුද?
Learning from experience is what separates people from animals, Ivan writes, and Sri Lankan society — literate, pleasant, clean — is at the bottom of the table for it. He tells of showing three professional visitors the published lists of office-holders under two governments, between 86 and 103 in each, and their astonishment; and asks what half-killed the country’s social spirit and what would revive it.
නැගෙනහිර ඡන්දය
The Eastern provincial council election is a turning point in the ethnic conflict, held in the territory the LTTE claimed while the war against it goes on. Ivan works through the demography district by district — no community holds a majority in the province — and the 2004 parliamentary results party by party, and shows why the chief ministership is the point of the dispute.
GSP+
The country faces losing the European tariff concession its garment exports depend on, and the political argument about it is being conducted without knowledge of the subject. Ivan explains what the concession is, what it is worth, why the crisis arose, how the conditions are being interpreted, and why a foreign policy still shaped by Cold War loyalties cannot handle it.
ද්රෝහියෙකු ලෙස අභිෂේක කිරීමට නියමිත විමල් වීරවංශ
Weerawansa is the largest political figure the JVP built after its second insurrection, Ivan writes, and he built himself — training his voice and his gestures on recordings of Wijeweera. The article follows him from that apprenticeship to the edge of expulsion, and sets his rise against the rural, under-privileged, low-caste base that both the JVP and the LTTE have drawn into violence and buried.
චෞර රැජිනගේ රසකථා
Reading Upul Joseph Fernando’s interview with Chandrika Kumaratunga in Lankadeepa, Ivan takes apart the picture of a poor and blameless former president whose children travel by bus. She names two mistakes she knew were mistakes when she made them, and Ivan supplies the reason she does not: the appetite for power inside a system she and Ranil Wickremesinghe built between them.
සෝමවංශ සේ ම වීරවංශ ද
The argument inside the JVP matters, Ivan writes, because until it began the party’s spokesmen described it as the cleanest in the country. He reads the sources — Nandana Gunathilaka’s series, Somawansa’s speech at the 1971 commemoration, Weerawansa’s answer in parliament — and works back through the party’s money to the years when its leaders needed intermediaries and protection.
හැරී ගුණතිලක
An obituary for Air Marshal Harry Gunetilleke, who died at seventy-nine. Ivan writes about how honest a man holding office can be, tells the story of the ban a president placed on him and how he had it lifted, and records that having a son as air force commander did not quiet him: he went on saying what he thought in public until he died.