ජිනීවා අර්බුදය-
Sri Lanka was right to oppose the US resolution at the Human Rights Council, Ivan writes, but its campaign damaged the country’s name — ending with Minister Mervyn Silva’s boast that he had Poddala Jayantha beaten and would punish others who went to Geneva. He warns against the view that the balance of power is shifting to China, arguing that India, soon larger and younger and closer to Western values, matters more to a country that lives ‘in India’s mouth’. National sovereignty is relative: as a UN member bound by the ICCPR, Sri Lanka cannot treat the Council’s action as unlawful. The war was fought within a civilised framework, but the Foreign Ministry lost the propaganda war, letting support fall from 32 votes in 2009 to 15 in 2012. The best course is to go beyond the resolution with a national programme to rebuild the state.
වාද කරන්නට පෙර ප්රකෘති සිහිය ඇති කරගැනීම වැදගත්ය
Answering Gamini Viyangoda and Jayatilaka Kammallaweera, who accused him of labelling them and of defending the Rajapaksa regime, Ivan restates his thesis: after losing socialism they adopted the ethnic crisis as their cause and lost their judgement when the LTTE fell, as he once feared a coup under Wijeweera’s spell before 1971. He rejects Viyangoda’s claim that he attacked individuals for twenty years and turned to ‘the system’ only to protect Rajapaksa, noting that his ‘Chaura Rajya’ series on reforming the predatory state ran in Ravaya in 2002, before ‘Chaura Rajina’ (2006), and listing earlier articles on system change. He recalls the Kaha Pati (yellow ribbon) campaign of 2000, the all-party talks on his reform draft in Parliament in 2001, and the 2006 Kobbekaduwa round table, and argues that reform must come by consensus, as Mandela achieved.
ඥානාන්විත වියයුතු තරමට ඥානාන්විත නොවීම
The government’s counter-campaign against the US resolution at the UN Human Rights Council, Ivan argues, damaged Sri Lanka’s image. It had a clear strategy to win the war but none for what followed: an angry Tamil diaspora that saw the defeat as genocide, a rift with the US after Colombo first agreed and then refused a plan to evacuate Prabhakaran and other leaders, and a drift towards China, Iran and Russia. Just as Western pressure eased to a call to implement the LLRC’s recommendations, the government failed to adapt. He names four failures: no nation-building reorganisation after the war, neglect of relations with the Western markets, broken promises to India over 13-plus, and slowness in restoring normality, ending abductions and withdrawing the forces from civilian life.
අහිංසාවාදයේ පැණි තැවරූ අවස්ථාවාදය
Dr Sunil Wijesiriwardena, who turned back at the gate of Ravaya’s anniversary rather than submit to security checks, wrote that two front-page photographs showed Ravaya treating its readers as a feudal lord treats low-caste visitors. Ivan answers with satire and six historical photographs — LSSP leaders seated above their supporters, Trotsky at the Comintern’s top table, Tagore, Gandhi and Nehru in chairs above others — to show where such reasoning leads. He then turns the test on Wijesiriwardena’s own record: how he ran his organisation Vibhavi, why it closed when foreign funding ended, and whether as a paid consultant to other NGOs he ever challenged their corruption. Those who judge others’ spaces, Ivan says, must first look at their own.
පවුල් දෙකක් සමග දීගකෑම ( රාවයේ 25 වැනි සංවත්සර කලාපය වෙනුවෙන් ලියූ ලිපියකි.)
Written for Ravaya’s 25th-anniversary issue, this personal essay describes how Ivan’s family says he has two families: his wife and three children, and Ravaya. Gandhi, his lifelong hero, failed as a father, as did Mandela and King, and Ivan resolved not to. He recalls weekends at home in Galle, his family’s refusal to exploit Ravaya, and his son’s reply to taunts after President Kumaratunga attacked Ivan on television and a fake Ravaya was circulated. But Ravaya was not always sensitive in return: reports on a school principal led to reprisals that drove his son, a six-time national chess champion, out of school; attacks on Dian Gomes cost the boy his sponsor; and the paper wounded friends such as Suranjith, Hemasiri Fernando, Susanthika Jayasinghe and Vimukthi Jayasundara. Critics, he says, must remember who their friends are.
පටිසෝතගාමී හා විප්ලවකාරී ළදරු වලිප්පුව
Replying to Gamini Viyangoda’s criticism of Ravaya’s anniversary, Ivan apologises to guests, including Chitrasena’s widow Vajira, who were distressed by the security checks, which he says could not be avoided once the President was invited. The real objection, he argues, is to the President’s presence and to Ravaya’s call for reform under this government. Rajapaksa’s regime, like its predecessors, is corrupt, wasteful and arbitrary, but it is not a dictatorship: it can be changed at elections, and a reorganisation of the political system needs the consent of both government and opposition. The critics’ insistence on waiting until the regime falls looks radical but is extreme and reactionary, and he asks why such a group has been pushed to that position.
රාවයේ 25 වෙනි සංවත්සරය වෙනුවෙන් පවත්වන ලද කතාව
In the address given at Ravaya’s 25th anniversary gathering, attended by the President, the Leader of the Opposition, and the leaders of the TNA and the Muslim Congress, Ivan explains why the paper convened such an assembly. Sri Lanka, he says, stands at a historic turning point: half of its 64 years of independence were spent in bloodshed, society itself is wounded, and the political system has decayed because the country never built a united nation and a democratic society. The defeat of the JVP in 1989 and the LTTE in 2009 has removed the main obstacle to reform and exposed the system’s rot. The alternative to a destructive revolution is a national reorganisation agreed by government and opposition, including a solution to the ethnic question and the LLRC’s recommendations.
25 වැනි සමරුව හා ව්යාකූලතා
Ivan reflects on objections, among a few readers and staff, to inviting the President and other leaders to Ravaya’s 25th anniversary. Ravaya’s readers have never held one view, he says: during 1988–89 it refused to use the insurrection to topple the UNP; it helped defeat that government in 1994 but refused to profit from the new one, learning that changing governments does not change the system. The deepest split came over the war against the LTTE, which Ravaya opposed in a way Ivan now calls sometimes unfair and extreme, while he himself saw a just and winnable war; he argues that the UNP obstructed it hoping for regime change, that Prabhakaran and Wijeweera both chose guns over politics, and that the 2010 election left a hatred between the two camps that now blocks reform.
සටන් කිරීම සහ අවසාන සටන
The third part recounts two interventions against lower-court decisions in the rape cases of two young girls, risking contempt of court. In the first (1993), after the Attorney General withdrew the case against a retired senior police officer, Ravaya ran a campaign aimed at the Attorney General himself, drawing reader protests, Professor Savitri Goonesekere and a public meeting until the case was re-filed; years later a false recantation, engineered through the convent where the girl lived, was exposed by the CID. In the second (1995), a magistrate who had freed a popular film actor fled the country, and the actor was convicted before being freed on appeal. Ivan draws the lesson that every fight for justice needs a philosophy, a strategy, determination and commitment, not just a protest.
රාවය 25 වසරක පටිසෝතගාමී අභිචාරිකාව
Ahead of the 28 February celebration, this special anniversary piece describes Ravaya’s 25 years as a ‘journey against the current’ (patisotagami abhicharika). Grounded in non-violence, democracy and pluralism, it was more a movement of ideas than a magazine or newspaper: sometimes revolutionary, sometimes conservative, sympathetic to rebels but never endorsing armed revolt, and always admitting its own mistakes. Its main political lesson is that changing governments cannot produce a good society while the corrupt political system remains — a change now possible because terrorism has been defeated and the system stands exposed. Ravaya’s task, it says, is to persuade leaders and parties to reform the system through a constituent assembly before the next change of government.