විග්නේශ්වරන් මුවහමක් කරගැනීම
Answering Sinhala nationalist attacks on C.V. Wigneswaran, the TNA’s Northern chief ministerial candidate, as a new Anton Balasingham, Ivan argues that the dream of Eelam died with the LTTE. The TNA’s surviving leaders were hostages of Prabhakaran, not his followers, and signalled goodwill that the victors ignored. Wigneswaran — a retired Supreme Court judge who refused to bow to Sarath N. Silva, never an LTTE sympathiser, with children married to Sinhalese — should be welcomed. As Europe learned after the Thirty Years’ War, racial and religious extremism is losing its hold in Sri Lanka too.
Anton Balasingham: He left the Buddha and went to Marx
Written after Anton Balasingham’s death, the piece traces how the LTTE’s theorist moved from Buddhism to Marxism and gave the Tamil struggle the goal of a separate state. Ivan recalls a 1995 dinner in Jaffna with Balasingham, suggests he came to doubt the separatist idea late in life, and urges Tamil militants to reconsider it.
The President and the JVP
Victor Ivan argues that unless Mahinda Rajapaksa resumes talks in defiance of the memoranda he signed with the JVP and the Jathika Hela Urumaya, war will return. He has already tested the limits: Norway remains facilitator despite an undertaking to remove it, talks look likely outside Asia against a condition that they be held within it, and Anton Balasingham has been summoned without objection. But Ivan doubts the JVP will let him go much further, and explains why its leaders cannot retreat even if some now privately doubt their own conditions — admitting error would expose them to their own members as politically shallow, so they must keep defending a position that no longer fits. The President’s first problem, he writes, is choosing between the JVP and the country. He then draws the parallel with Chandrika Kumaratunga, freed from the UNP’s encirclement by the JVP only to find herself in its prison instead, and notes that Rajapaksa faces the same choice in far better conditions: the UNP fragmented, its alliances weakened, and the LTTE no longer friendly to it.
කෙළෙහි ගුණ දැක්වීම
Ivan notes that the President was met in London by Ronnie Peiris, who had helped her in exile after Vijaya Kumaratunga’s murder and has since grown rich, and says the UNP’s promised inquiries into such figures have gone quiet. Further sections note that she named Sarath N. Silva as a drafter of her constitution though he sat on the bench reviewing it, praise Anton Balasingham’s endorsement of Neelan Tiruchelvam’s 1996 devolution plan, and ask why no one has sought Tony Fernando’s release.
හදිසි මැතිවරණයක
As the ceasefire agreement with the LTTE nears its first anniversary, the seizure of a boat carrying anti-aircraft weapons shows the LTTE is ready for war, unsettled by talk of a snap dissolution and the President’s pact with the JVP. The editorial warns that an election under cohabitation would be a violent contest, and lists eight points the parties should agree, including electoral reform, restoring the independent commissions, a neutral caretaker government and a five-year national government.
A Snap Election
In a climate where peace hangs by a thread, the looming threat of a snap election promises not a democratic transition, but a destructive contest of death. Caught in a bitter, bilateral deadlock, the Executive President and the Prime Minister are poised to drag the nation into a mad struggle for supremacy. With the LTTE watching warily from the wings, an election waged in the “law of the jungle” risks plunging the exhausted country back into anarchy. To prevent this impending peril, civil society must forcefully demand a civilized consensus—a unified, all-party commitment to structural reform, independent electoral oversight, and a non-military resolution—before the ballot box is completely broken by the barrel of a gun.
සාමය ජයගැනීම සරල නැත
The editorial rejects criticism of the LTTE’s participation in the Oslo aid conference, arguing that both parties jointly seeking reconstruction aid is positive. It notes Anton Balasingham’s measured reply to the US Deputy Secretary of State, the LTTE’s shift from a separate state to internal self-rule and Prabhakaran’s conciliatory Heroes’ Day speech. On LTTE police stations and courts, it argues regional policing is part of devolution and that successive governments’ failure to provide Tamil-language police and courts is partly to blame.
ප්රභාකරන් එන්න යන්නේ මොකාටද?
Ivan rejects the JVP-led reading that Prabhakaran’s press conference shows he still wants Eelam, arguing he had to address the international community, the government and his own followers at once. Facing hostile journalists was itself an achievement, and his regretful tone about past violence contrasted with the JVP’s justifications. Drawing on the JVP’s own history, the ANC and the IRA, he predicts the LTTE’s barracks culture will fade only slowly and that Prabhakaran’s real test will be governing.
ඇනීටා, ප්රභාකරන් හා චන්ද්රිකා
Prompted by Anita Pratap’s book Island of Blood, Ivan recalls his own part in the 1994–95 peace efforts: prison talks with Tamil detainees after 1971, his view that Chandrika Kumaratunga used the peace issue for Tamil votes, his attempt to broker trust between her and Ranil Wickremesinghe, and a March 1995 Jaffna visit where he helped secure the release of fifteen police prisoners. He also recounts learning from Anton Balasingham of a secret message she sent Prabhakaran through Pratap, and the resumption of war in April 1995.
Ensuring healthy peace talks
After the failure of Agni Khiela the government has had to soften the hard conditions it set for starting talks. It now enters negotiations from weakness rather than strength, and the talks are likelier to deepen its crisis than to steady it.