Queen of Deceit Found Guilty
On 8 October 2008 the Supreme Court returned to the UDA 224 acres vested in Asia Golf Company under former President Chandrika Kumaratunga, the Waters Edge case. Ivan uses the judgment to set out how the political system pays supporters and financiers out of public property, and argues that it establishes a public-trust principle future presidents must heed.
සමාජ අධ්යාත්මය ඝාතනය කරනු ලැබුවෝ කවුද?
Learning from experience is what separates people from animals, Ivan writes, and Sri Lankan society — literate, pleasant, clean — is at the bottom of the table for it. He tells of showing three professional visitors the published lists of office-holders under two governments, between 86 and 103 in each, and their astonishment; and asks what half-killed the country’s social spirit and what would revive it.
නැගෙනහිර ඡන්දය
The Eastern provincial council election is a turning point in the ethnic conflict, held in the territory the LTTE claimed while the war against it goes on. Ivan works through the demography district by district — no community holds a majority in the province — and the 2004 parliamentary results party by party, and shows why the chief ministership is the point of the dispute.
චෞර රැජිනගේ රසකථා
Reading Upul Joseph Fernando’s interview with Chandrika Kumaratunga in Lankadeepa, Ivan takes apart the picture of a poor and blameless former president whose children travel by bus. She names two mistakes she knew were mistakes when she made them, and Ivan supplies the reason she does not: the appetite for power inside a system she and Ranil Wickremesinghe built between them.
සෝමවංශ සේ ම වීරවංශ ද
The argument inside the JVP matters, Ivan writes, because until it began the party’s spokesmen described it as the cleanest in the country. He reads the sources — Nandana Gunathilaka’s series, Somawansa’s speech at the 1971 commemoration, Weerawansa’s answer in parliament — and works back through the party’s money to the years when its leaders needed intermediaries and protection.
හැරී ගුණතිලක
An obituary for Air Marshal Harry Gunetilleke, who died at seventy-nine. Ivan writes about how honest a man holding office can be, tells the story of the ban a president placed on him and how he had it lifted, and records that having a son as air force commander did not quiet him: he went on saying what he thought in public until he died.
වඩා ප්රමුඛ වර්ගය ද? කුලය ද?
Answering Gamini Viyangoda’s criticism of his position on the ethnic crisis, Ivan opens the side of it nobody wants to discuss. The ethnic question is half the truth, he argues, not the whole: the 1971 insurrection, the monks who joined it, the Samasamaja movement, the second insurrection and the killing of Saddhatissa all point to inequality inside the communities as well as between them.
අචේ විසඳුම ම ශ්රී ලංකාවට ද ගැලපේ
Prabhakaran can stop the war as surely as the president can, Ivan writes, and the main obstacle to a negotiated settlement is the Thimpu principles, framed to make negotiation impossible and since treated as its precondition. He sets out the Aceh settlement and what its equivalent would look like here: disarmament, the withdrawal of the additional forces, the high security zones gone, people back on their land and an interim administration until a provincial election.
රටේ දේශපාලන නායකත්වය පිළිබඳ ගැටලුව
A Sunday Times survey of 519 people for the sixtieth anniversary asked which post-independence leader had most capacity to take the country forward. No leader had won the confidence of a majority; D.S. Senanayake came first and even he scored low; Chandrika Kumaratunga drew one per cent. Ivan reads the result as a verdict on what the office does to whoever holds it.
හොංකොංවලින් උගත හැකි පාඩම් (1)
Hong Kong before 1974 was as rotten as Sri Lanka — a bribe was a condition of getting anything done, including calling the fire brigade. Today its police force is among the cleanest in the world. In the first of two parts Ivan sets out how corruption is structured here instead: what political power is worth, why business invests in politicians rather than in business, and what the country pays for it.