අභිමත බලය කොයිබටද?
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 the Bribery Commission despite past controversies, and warns that such use of presidential discretion, with opposition silence, is ruining the country.
What signals do appointments give 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?
Tactics to ensure parliamentary power
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.
Hatred: barrier for fruitful talks
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.
When will wisdom dawn on them?
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 selfish and ridiculous farce.
Way to peace is found within
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.
Is history repeating itself?
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 of the 1980s, read through Mick Moore.
Why president’s office sent an angry reply to me
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 and hatred.
Political solutions or political opportunism
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 every agreement has been struck.
A new age of terror
The government called the harassment of the singers Rukantha Gunatilaka and Chandralekha Perera a robbery, and the levelling of Anoja Weerasinghe’s house at Moneragala a personal grudge. Set those explanations beside each other, Ivan argues, and a pattern appears that the country has seen before.