Putrefaction and end
With the presidential election set for December, Victor Ivan argues that every major leader has an interest in keeping the country unstable until polling day — and that none of them will touch the reforms that matter.
What is More Decisive: Ethnicity or Class?
Ivan argues that Sri Lanka’s crisis is not only ethnic: caste, which the youth commission found behind the second JVP rising, cuts across it. He draws on his own custody after 1971, when he was known as Podi Athula, on the caste make-up of the JVP and LTTE, and on the killing of a school principal during the second insurrection.
මැතිවරණ නීති උල්ලංඝනය
The campaign is calmer than before, but the state media’s behaviour has not changed and the Elections Commissioner has not dealt with it. Sections follow on ‘the 2005 conspiracy’, Mangala Samaraweera’s democracy, including Ports Authority money spent on his mother’s official residence, Soma Thera and the doctor branded a traitor for finding his death natural, and an assassination plot.
ටෙම්ප්ටේෂන්
The contested Shah Rukh Khan concert ended in violence, two deaths and injuries, after protests that it should not be held on the eve of Soma Thera’s first death anniversary. The editorial calls it a disgrace tied to religious fundamentalism and warns that a country unable to solve its old problems keeps adding new ones.
සෝම හිමිගේ අපවත්වීම, ආගම්භේද හා ශ්රී ලංකාවේ ජාතිකත්ව ගැටලුව
After Soma Thera’s death, fear spread among Christians that they might be attacked, and the old charge of ‘unethical conversions’ became a claim that Christian forces were killing Buddhist leaders. Ivan asks whether religion is becoming an explosive dividing line like race and language, and looks back to Asoka’s empire and the Buddhist idea of the state.
සෝම හිමියන්ගේ අපවත්වීමට මුවාවී චෝදනාලාභී පුද්ගල තුන්කට්ටුවක් රට ගිනි තබයි
An investigation of the leaflet campaign that followed the death of Gangodawila Soma Thera, which claimed that Ravaya was funded by American churches to attack three ‘Buddhist leaders’: Chief Justice Sarath N. Silva, the Public Trustee Sarath Seneviratne and Telecom chairman Thilanga Sumathipala. The piece traces who produced and paid for the leaflets and the ‘Bodu Handa’ newspaper, and argues that the aim was to inflame religious feeling to shield men facing corruption and criminal charges.
ෆෙඩරල් අපභ්රංසය
Prompted by the LTTE’s statement that it would drop the demand for a separate state in return for internal self-rule under a federal system, Ivan argues that constitutional debate should not be confined to ethnic grievances, since discontent with the political system is widespread. He then sets out the basic features of federalism with examples from the United States, India, Switzerland, Australia, Canada and Belgium, covering amendment procedures, second chambers, division of powers and dispute resolution, and rebuts popular myths such as a federal unit’s supposed right to secede.