What Can Happen?
Victor Ivan returns to Johan Galtung’s warning that Sri Lanka might end up temporarily under United Nations administration if it fails to manage its crises. Having read Ivan’s An Unfinished Struggle, Galtung reasoned that a judiciary decayed to that degree implied equal decay elsewhere, and that only a failing state deteriorates so far. Ivan’s test is whether serious mistakes get corrected, and he finds no mechanism that does. An election was held without an elections commission because the President twice refused to approve a list the constitutional council had vetted and cleared; parliament and the judiciary both declined to intervene; and with the council’s own term expired, the police and public service commissions cannot be constituted either, making every transfer, promotion and disciplinary action in those services unconstitutional. A year after the tsunami, 6% of the required houses are built — seventeen years at that rate — and the country cannot yet say how many of its dead were men and how many women. He then reads the party system as collapsing: Thondaman reduced to seeking LTTE shelter, the UNP too decayed to reform itself, the SLFP surviving only on state power. Only the JVP and the LTTE retain vigour, and both, he argues, have spent their history accelerating the state’s decay.
Alliance Government Crosses A Difficult Hurdle
Thondaman’s CWC has brought eight MPs to the Alliance, and with three from the SLMC and one JHU monk the government reaches 118 — enough to govern, but thirty-two short of what the President actually wants. Victor Ivan credits her nerve: she dissolved a parliament the UNP controlled, broke her promise to the Speaker, allied with the JVP at the risk of her own party, and won a gamble that had her survival at stake, while the leader of the opposition remained in a world of his dreams. Her remaining aim is to avoid invalidation at the end of her second term, and Ivan judges that despite her stated preference for abolishing the executive presidency she will instead seek to amend it to permit three terms — a course she can justify to the minorities, to her own party and to the JVP in turn. The arithmetic runs through Prabhakaran: satisfying him on the ISGA delivers the TNA’s twenty-two MPs and brings a two-thirds majority within ten UNP defections. The difficulty is pleasing Prabhakaran and Wimal Weerawansa at once.
The UPFA Government’s Future
Two months after the 2004 general election the UPFA still lacks 113 seats, and Victor Ivan sets out why it may never reach them. Thondaman’s CWC is gone, the TNA route is closed by the JVP’s line on the LTTE, and the crossover rule strips defecting MPs of their seats — except the JHU’s bhikkhu MPs, who contested without a party constitution and so cannot be disciplined, though poaching them would provoke the JHU into fury. Until the government proves its majority it can do nothing else, including the new constitution the President dissolved parliament to obtain, and only fourteen months remain before the presidential election. Ivan then turns to the economy, arguing the UNF lost because ordinary people saw no dividend from peace while the business community did, and warning that the end of the garment quota system in December threatens an industry supplying 60% of export income and up to 150,000 jobs at home and in the Middle East. The JVP, he concludes, has shown a clean lifestyle but not yet the maturity its mandate demands, and its fate may prove more tragic than the traditional left’s.