ඔබාමාගේ ජයග්රහණය මානව වර්ගයාගේ අපේක්ෂාව
A black candidate made this American election the whole world’s election, and his victory the political event of our time. Ivan traces the distance from slavery through Lincoln and Martin Luther King, and sets out what the world now wants from the most powerful state on earth — a development policy that narrows the gap between rich and poor countries, and equal standing for nations large and small.
ඔබාමාගේ ජය සැමරුම හා විජේවීරගේ ඉල්මහ සැමරුම
Ivan reads everything written about Obama in the Sinhala press, and finds two sentences in the JVP’s own paper and no analysis at all. The same weekend the papers give Rohana Wijeweera large space. From there he asks the question the two commemorations put together: who may lead this country — and answers that leadership here is still fixed by race, religion and caste, and that the day talent alone decides it is the day the country becomes free.
යුද්ධය හා අර්බුදයට විසඳුමක් සොයා ගැනීම
The LTTE played the Tamil Nadu card skilfully and did not get what it wanted; India sent relief to the displaced instead of pressing for a ceasefire. Ivan then turns to the harder half — a settlement everyone can accept — and works through the shift to guerrilla warfare, what kind of settlement would do, and how devolution could actually be built, using education as the worked example.
පමාවී ඇස් ඇරීම
The government’s invitation to UN High Commissioner Navi Pillay, a new commission on disappearances and arrests over the Trincomalee killings show, Ivan says, that it has finally grasped world realities — too late. Firmness during the war was right; afterwards it should have changed gear and cooperated with the UN as any member must, like a cricket board with the ICC. Instead, swayed by extremists who believed a China–Russia–Iran bloc was rising, it picked fights with the West and India. He recounts the meeting after the Darusman report where that line prevailed.
බින් ලාඩන් හා ප්රභාකරන් පරාජය කිරීම
America has at last managed to end the life of Bin Laden, the terrorist who held the whole of America in dread. Ivan sets that beside the two Sri Lankan cases — Wijeweera’s second insurrection and the defeat of Prabhakaran — and asks what a war against terrorism is, and where the difference lies.
ඇමරිකාව හා ශ්රී ලංකාව
Bin Laden was a terrorist leader who had become a great threat to America, and America had the right to destroy him — we can be glad of it too. But America paid an enormous price for a partial victory: it overthrew the governments of two countries, and hundreds of thousands had to be killed to put down the unrest that followed.
සංවර්ධනය හා ජනමාධ්යවේදීන්ගේ සමාජ වගකීම
By development Ivan means progress in any field — a country’s as a whole, or the economy, politics, health, transport, education, science, the environment, the spiritual — and what he wants to talk about is what a journalist’s part in that process should be. Seven sections follow, from Warren Buffett to the development of Colombo.
බල තරගයේ හැඩතල
The picture has changed from one in which the government would win any election easily to one in which it must fight for them. Ivan traces the crisis to the scale of the president’s own coming victory, and argues that the country turned a policy of taking help from the anti-American world into publicly campaigning for it — going so far as to attack Obama, which even China, Iran and Venezuela did not do.
සාකච්ඡා කිරීම හා සටන් කිරීම
Accused at a public forum of helping the government’s war, Ivan answers by setting out
thirty years of his own dealings with power: the twenty-odd statements he has given the CID,
the night J.R. Jayewardene ordered him to drop a column and the month he obeyed before
resuming it, the raid on the Ravaya office five days after he declined President Premadasa’s
invitation, and the meetings with Chandrika Kumaratunga after attacks on journalists.
Journalists, he argues, should be able to telephone anyone in the country; the fault lies
only in misusing the connection.
Political Funds- The Root of corruption
Ivan argues that the absence of any law on party and election funding is the main source of corruption in Sri Lanka. He compares the spending limits and disclosure rules of the United States, France and India with Sri Lanka’s single, unenforced assets law, and describes how candidates repay their backers from public resources.