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.
සහල් අර්බුදය
Rice disappeared from the market as soon as a controlled price was set. Ivan explains why — no paddy left in the marketing board, buying entirely through private traders, and no reason for a miller to sell below what he paid — adds the floods and the export restrictions in the rice-growing countries, and argues the moment is an opening for agriculture rather than only a shortage.
ජීවන වියදම් ගින්නෙන් දැවෙන ජනතාව
Ivan lays out the year’s price rises item by item from the agriculture department’s own figures — red raw rice from 39.34 rupees a kilo to over 70, samba to over 80, a coconut from 19 to 45, dhal from 86.48 to 160 — and asks what relief the government intends. His answers are practical: put uncultivated land to use, encourage home gardens, control crop damage by monkeys, and find something for those living on wages alone.
Where did the Bribery & Corruption Commission Go Wrong?
Responding to the removal of the Bribery Commission’s Director General Piyasena Ranasinghe, Ivan argues the Commission was already a failed institution. He cites its handling of Mangala Samaraweera’s credit cards and the Public Trustee inquiry, retired judges as commissioners, the lack of any oversight, and the career of Rienzie Arsakularatne, and proposes a body to inspect the Commission itself.
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.
ජවිපෙ අර්බුදය කොයිබට ද?
The attempt to strip Weerawansa of his position has turned him round to attack the party, and ten of its members of parliament have publicly backed him. Ivan reads it as a split that cannot be contained, predicts where the pieces will go at the next election, and traces the decline to a movement that never acquired the political knowledge its constituency needed.
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.
ප්රචණ්ඩත්වය වන්දනාමාන කිරීම
The JVP rose twice in arms and the LTTE is still fighting; between them more than a hundred thousand are dead, and both movements commemorate their own dead without distinction as heroes. Ivan says the JVP’s transformation into a parliamentary party is good and incomplete: it has not yet given up honouring its own violence, and among the heroes it commemorates are people who killed without reason.
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.