අධිකරණය විසින් අර්බුදය කබලෙන් ලිපට දැමීම
Instead of helping to put out the fire burning in the country the judiciary is feeding it straw. The North and the East were merged under the Indo-Lanka accord, under Indian pressure and on the strong demand of Tamil politicians, in recognition that those areas are the traditional homeland of the Tamil people and in order to build a provincial council system to fit. Whether it is their historical homeland was always arguable — and it was not for a court to settle it this way.
පක්ෂ නායකයින්ගේ බූදල් බවට හැරී ඇති පක්ෂ අරමුදල්
Even a small funeral aid society in a village gives its members an account of what it took in and what it spent. Parties that handle hundreds of millions give their annual accounts neither to their members nor even to their own highest bodies. Every party has a treasurer and he is there in name only: the leader handles the money, the leader alone knows what the funds are, and no member may ask.
යුද්ධයේ අනාගතය ()
The government is still managing to run the war to its own advantage, and whether the LTTE’s retreat is temporary or permanent will be decided soon. Ivan puts the movement’s political immaturity at the centre of its decline — it should either not have destroyed Ranil Wickremesinghe, or, having done so, should have consolidated peace and pressed for a settlement instead of returning to claymore attacks.
මංගල හා ශ්රීපතිගේ මරාගෙන මැරෙන ප්රහාරය
Politically, Ivan reads the two men’s assault on the president as a suicide attack: destroying themselves in order to destroy him. He notes how carefully the charges were divided between them — the war to Sripathi, a short list to Mangala — and what the attack says in Aesop’s language: that the president has no vision, no gratitude, and thinks of his family rather than the country.
මංගල, ශ්රීපතිගේ රාජපක්ෂ විරෝධය
A friend asks Ivan why he backed the rebels against Premadasa and will not back these. The answer is the difference between the two revolts: Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake had a vision for reforming the system as well as a quarrel with the man, and this one is a fight to move one person out and another in. Along the way he sets out what was irregular about the 1991 impeachment.
රනිල් පරමේශ්වරී හා ජනමාධ්යය
At a reception for the released Mawbima journalist Munusamy Parameswari, the opposition leader said she had thanked him and not her own colleagues, and used it to criticise journalists and their organisations. Ivan accepts the charge in part and turns it round: a state rots when the opposition fails its duty as much as when the government and the press fail theirs, and Sri Lanka has had all three.
මානසික ත්රස්තවාදය හා වාචික ත්රස්තවාදය
Three media people in Ivan’s house tell him an e-mail is circulating saying the president pays him two lakhs a month; he shows them the anonymous abuse on his own phone, sent from an untraceable number. From there he describes a smear published by an award-winning journalist who had not read the book she was writing about and did not ask him — and argues for an atmosphere in which governments can be changed without this kind of damage.
තමුසෙ කව්ද?
B.H. Farmer saw Sri Lanka’s present crisis coming, and wrote as early as 1963 that the country had divided beyond reassembly — by caste, by community and by religion. Ivan builds on him: the divisions return again and again, sometimes of themselves and sometimes when the poor are given someone to blame, and the politics of proving yourself a better Buddhist than the next man makes the quarrel worse.
වික්ටර් අයිවන්ට පිළිතුරක් තවත් බොහෝ දේ තිබේ
**Not by Victor Ivan.** Uvindu Kurukulasuriya’s reply, printed in Ravaya, to Ivan’s two-part series on criminal defamation. He quotes the anonymous friend from the opening of Ivan’s first article, argues that the media organisations did fight the law, sets out what the foreign delegations and the parliamentary select committee did, and holds Ivan’s own article against Ravaya’s three founding principles of truthfulness, honesty and impartiality.
රනිල් මංගල සන්ධානය
The value of money is evaporating, inflation is at twenty per cent, bank rates are climbing, economic activity is shrinking and the administrative and war costs are rising. Into that Ivan reads the new alliance: the second place it gives Mangala Samaraweera has not pleased the UNP’s own second rank, and the crossover laws it promises already exist and are already ignored.