මංගල-මහින්ද හටන හා ජනමාධ්ය අද්වකාත්ලාගේ හාන්සි පුටු විප්ලවය
Ivan thanks Uvindu Kurukulasuriya for continuing the argument and then sets out the difference between them: a working journalist lives by journalism, an advocate for media freedom lives by advocacy. He answers the charges, sets out his own complaint about the criminal defamation law and how it was used against Sinha Ratnatunga, Bandula Padmakumara and Lasantha Wickrematunge as well as himself, and names what the profession lacks — a tradition of acting together, and a place of its own to meet in.
නිදහස, මර්දනය හා ජනමාධ්ය දේශපාලනය
The most personal piece of the year. Buddhika telephoned at three in the morning to say the Leader press had been burned; Ivan listened and went back to sleep, and the column is his reckoning with why. It becomes an account of two editors in the same trade on opposite sides — he fought Sarath N. Silva’s appointment as chief justice while Lasantha approved it — and of what S.B. Dissanayake told them about a plan to kill them both.
සනත් බාලසූරිය, පෝද්දල ජයන්ත හා ආරක්ෂක ලේකම්
The president and secretary of the working journalists’ association say they were summoned to the defence secretary and told to drop their criticism of the war, and warned what people who love the army might do to them. Ivan says the threat cannot be defended at any level — and then tells journalists that friction between those who fight wars and those who report them is normal, and reminds them how de Gaulle treated Le Monde.
සිදුවූයේ කුමක්ද? විය හැක්කේ කුමක්ද?
Sri Lanka’s throat was caught in two nooses, Ivan writes — terrorism and the political system — and the first is nearly loosed. He explains his own shift: he doubted the account that armed struggle followed the failure of non-violent politics, doubted the Tamil homeland claim, and was moved decisively by the LTTE’s treatment of Ranil Wickremesinghe, who had given them more space than any Sinhala leader and whom they destroyed politically. He defends Rajapaksa’s decision as the most important and most dangerous taken since independence, and argues the war could have gone very differently had the LTTE succeeded in mass suicide attacks, a single trap killing thousands of soldiers, or coordinated massacres in fifty or sixty villages. He then judges the opposition, the courts and the press all to have acted without responsibility, and disputes the reported threatening of Poddala Jayantha and Sanath Balasuriya by the Defence Secretary.
ලසන්ත වික්රමතුංග
Ten days after the murder, Ivan writes about a friend he had fallen out with. Lasantha was the finest investigative journalist Sri Lanka has produced — the instinct, the persistence, the ability to read what documents concealed — but the politician inside him was a small man, wielding the pen to install a UNP government in which he expected a senior ministry. He exposed his opponents’ corruption without mercy and covered up his own side’s. Ivan recounts the 1999 Town Hall bomb, when both were to be arrested and they packed bags for Singapore until Ranil Wickremesinghe called Lasantha back; Chandrika Kumaratunga’s later claim that she stopped a minister’s plan to kill them; and the quarrel over her interview and Ivan’s book that soured the friendship. Assassination, he writes, gave the life its meaning.
ජනාධිපති ලේකම්ට පිළිතුරක්
An open letter to Kusumsiri Balapatabendi answering his statement that private media were running a campaign linking the President and her security division to murders. Ivan lists attacks on Lasantha Wickrematunge and himself, the President’s own claim to have stopped a plot to kill two editors, S.B. Dissanayake’s account of her plan to bomb Ravaya and the Sunday Leader, and evidence linking presidential security men to the killings of Rohana Kumara and Kumar Ponnambalam and the assault on Rookantha and Chandraleka, and offers to join an impartial inquiry.
Criminal defamation Vs. Media freedom
Media freedom is treated as an essential part of a democratic system, and by accepted standards Sri Lanka is among the countries with least of it. The media minister told his first press conference that the government had been brought to power mainly by the media.
ජනමාධ්ය නිදහසට එරෙහිව සාපරාධී අපහාස නීතිය
Although its first media minister Dharmasiri Senanayake called the People’s Alliance a government brought to power by journalists, it has reformed only parliamentary privilege law and, instead of repealing criminal defamation, filed twelve cases against editors, six of them against Ravaya. Sinha Ratnatunga and Lasantha Wickrematunge were convicted of defaming the President, who never testified. The editorial contrasts English practice and the Salman Rushdie episode, cites New York Times v. Sullivan, and notes that the 1996 recommendations of the R.K.W. Goonesekere committee were ignored.