17 වැනි සංශෝධනය හා මැතිවරණ කොමිසම
Provincial elections are being held without the Elections Commission the 17th Amendment
requires, because Chandrika Kumaratunga refused to appoint one and the refusal has outlived
her. Ivan sets the Indian Election Commission against it — its own budget, its own
quasi-judicial powers, 668 million voters and 800,000 polling stations — and argues that an
amendment bolted on to a constitution built around an unaccountable president was never
going to hold.
ගන්ධබ්බ තත්ත්වයකට පත්ව සිටින ජනමාධ්යවේදීන්
The Sirasa attack and Lasantha’s killing have frightened journalists, some of whom have already left the country, and many now speak of a terrible new era. Ivan argues it is not new: every administration since 1978 has done this. Under Jayewardene no mainstream paper criticised the government even over the opposition leader’s civic rights, the hooting of Supreme Court judges, or the pardon of Gonawala Sunil; only opposition papers did, and they were sealed and prosecuted for criminal defamation. Under Chandrika Kumaratunga, whom journalists helped bring to power, Satana’s editor Rohana Kumara was shot in circumstances close to Lasantha’s, and Lasantha himself was beaten and his house fired on. Yet the press has now cast her as saviour, and made Mangala Samaraweera — once the symbol of media repression, whose effigies they burned — the chief mourner. Journalists forget, and in forgetting protect the system.
ලසන්ත වික්රමතුංග
Ten days after the murder, Ivan writes about a friend he had fallen out with. Lasantha was the finest investigative journalist Sri Lanka has produced — the instinct, the persistence, the ability to read what documents concealed — but the politician inside him was a small man, wielding the pen to install a UNP government in which he expected a senior ministry. He exposed his opponents’ corruption without mercy and covered up his own side’s. Ivan recounts the 1999 Town Hall bomb, when both were to be arrested and they packed bags for Singapore until Ranil Wickremesinghe called Lasantha back; Chandrika Kumaratunga’s later claim that she stopped a minister’s plan to kill them; and the quarrel over her interview and Ivan’s book that soured the friendship. Assassination, he writes, gave the life its meaning.
Where did the Bribery & Corruption Commission Go Wrong?
Responding to the removal of the Bribery Commission’s Director General Piyasena Ranasinghe, Ivan argues the Commission was already a failed institution. He cites its handling of Mangala Samaraweera’s credit cards and the Public Trustee inquiry, retired judges as commissioners, the lack of any oversight, and the career of Rienzie Arsakularatne, and proposes a body to inspect the Commission itself.
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.
මංගලගේ ආරක්ෂාව හා දේශපාලන භූමිකාව
Mangala Samaraweera says he is an LTTE target, that his guard is inadequate and that the government will answer for anything that happens to him. Ivan agrees he should be properly protected and then declines to join the procession: he recalls what was done to Ravaya through the labour department when Samaraweera held office, and says a man who wants to start again should begin with self-criticism.
මහින්ද රනිල් පොරය
In this political system the ruler and the leader of the opposition can survive only by destabilising each other, Ivan writes, and the system has decayed far enough that each attempt weakens both. He reads Ranil Wickremesinghe waiting to be chosen as the next saviour and Mahinda Rajapaksa waiting on the war, and says both are prisoners of the same corrupt arrangement.
The Third Reading of the Budget: What might happen?
After the government survived the second reading of the 2008 budget, Ivan weighs the UNP’s chances of defeating it at the third. He argues that even a defeat would not force a dissolution, that MPs want to finish their terms, and that party leaders should stop fighting over a rotten system and agree to change it.
Mangala’s Unfinished Revolution
Mangala Samaraweera’s revolt against President Rajapaksa has hurt the regime, but Ivan finds it neither consistent nor honest. He compares it with the 1991 impeachment move by Athulathmudali and Dissanayake, and reminds readers of the share Samaraweera took under Kumaratunga and of the waste in the institutions he controlled.
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.