First, rescue Parliament, then the country
Johan Galtung once told Victor Ivan what Sri Lanka would become. Thirty years on the column takes that forecast as its starting point and argues the Parliament must be rescued before the country can be.
Nudity exposed
The Ramanayake tapes let Victor Ivan return to a case he pursued for years — a magistrate, an attorney general and a chief justice — and to what he says the episode did to the Sri Lankan judiciary.
මගේ සිහිනය ගැන වැඩිදුරටත්
Replying to readers’ reactions to his plan to reorganise Ravaya, Ivan explains his habit of seeing things unconventionally, as Gandhi and Mandela did, and sets his plan against his forecast that Sri Lanka is heading for anarchy. After Prabhakaran’s defeat the political system stood exposed; Mahinda Rajapaksa, the only leader left, failed to rebuild the state, and parties on both sides are historically spent. With a monk’s self-immolation over cattle slaughter and the row over the Thirteenth Amendment as signs, he argues Ravaya must be strengthened to guide readers through the coming collapse.
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.
සාම කතා වැඩපිළිවෙළත් අවුලක
Johan Galtung’s prediction that a peace process built on the carrot of aid would fail seems to be coming true. The piece argues that people fight over grievances, not money, and cites Willy Brandt and Desmond Tutu on healing inner wounds through apology and truth. It says the LTTE, undefeated and running its own institutions, must be dealt with as a quasi-government, and that its withdrawal over the Washington meeting and unmet resettlement pledges leaves the Tokyo aid conference without it.
අභ්යන්තර තුවාල හඳුනාගැනීම
Writing after a workshop in Austria led by conflict-resolution scholar Johan Galtung, Ivan takes up Galtung’s point that history and myth feed Sri Lanka’s conflict. Drawing on B.H. Farmer’s ‘Ceylon: A Divided Nation’, he traces how the Mahavamsa’s stories of Vijaya, Mahinda and Dutugemunu shaped a Sinhala sense of special origin and of the Tamil as historic enemy, a potential tapped from Dharmapala and S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike to the JVP, and argues that these inner wounds must be treated along with the outer ones.
ශ්රී ලංකාව සඳහා මහාචාර්ය ගල්ටුන් නිර්දේශ කරන පෙඩරල් මාදිලිය
Noting which parties favour or oppose federalism, the piece outlines the model Johan Galtung put to a mixed Sri Lankan audience: bicameral legislatures at the centre and in the provinces, with a senate in which each ethnic group has equal representation and a veto on matters affecting it, so that minorities in both south and north-east are protected. It compares the US, Swiss and Indian second chambers and notes Galtung’s views on soft borders, courts and the division of powers.