සනත් බාලසූරිය, පෝද්දල ජයන්ත හා ආරක්ෂක ලේකම්
The president and secretary of the working journalists’ association say they were summoned to the defence secretary and told to drop their criticism of the war, and warned what people who love the army might do to them. Ivan says the threat cannot be defended at any level — and then tells journalists that friction between those who fight wars and those who report them is normal, and reminds them how de Gaulle treated Le Monde.
රජය හා ජනමාධ්ය
The quarrel between the defence ministry and the press is running on without a settlement: Keith Noyahr is leaving the country and The Nation’s editor is thinking of it. Ivan calls it the president’s responsibility to stop this going further, and tells journalists that press freedom cannot exist inside a semi-autocratic system, so the goal has to be the system, not a change of tenants.
ජනමාධ්ය ගැන රනිල් වික්රමසිංහගේ විවේචනය
At a press conference on 1 December the opposition leader turned the questions back on the questioner, and then criticised the Sri Lankan press at large. Ivan treats the complaint as the opening of a debate worth having: journalists may question politicians, but the complaint against the culture of the press is a strong one, and it points at the same system that everything else points at.
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.