පෝද්දල ජයන්තට පහරදීම
After a television programme used footage of Poddala Jayantha and Sunanda Deshapriya while
alleging that some journalists were paid by the LTTE, Poddala came to Ivan and asked him to
intervene. Ivan describes what he did, what the president said when the question was put to
him, and why he thinks naming such journalists would have been ruinous — and argues that the
fault can only be corrected by looking critically back at the policy that produced it.
ජාතිවාදය බෙදුම්වාදය හා කල්ලිවාදය
Ivan takes the president’s promise that there will be no more room for separatism — and,
importantly, for racism — as the right formula, since each feeds the other. The victory
should produce humility rather than triumph, and the test of it is whether wrong opinions
are defeated by argument rather than by threat, and whether thinkers, journalists and
artists can say what they think without fear for their lives.
සිදුවූයේ කුමක්ද? විය හැක්කේ කුමක්ද?
Sri Lanka’s throat was caught in two nooses, Ivan writes — terrorism and the political system — and the first is nearly loosed. He explains his own shift: he doubted the account that armed struggle followed the failure of non-violent politics, doubted the Tamil homeland claim, and was moved decisively by the LTTE’s treatment of Ranil Wickremesinghe, who had given them more space than any Sinhala leader and whom they destroyed politically. He defends Rajapaksa’s decision as the most important and most dangerous taken since independence, and argues the war could have gone very differently had the LTTE succeeded in mass suicide attacks, a single trap killing thousands of soldiers, or coordinated massacres in fifty or sixty villages. He then judges the opposition, the courts and the press all to have acted without responsibility, and disputes the reported threatening of Poddala Jayantha and Sanath Balasuriya by the Defence Secretary.