නැගෙනහිර ඡන්දය
The Eastern provincial council election is a turning point in the ethnic conflict, held in the territory the LTTE claimed while the war against it goes on. Ivan works through the demography district by district — no community holds a majority in the province — and the 2004 parliamentary results party by party, and shows why the chief ministership is the point of the dispute.
ද්රෝහියෙකු ලෙස අභිෂේක කිරීමට නියමිත විමල් වීරවංශ
Weerawansa is the largest political figure the JVP built after its second insurrection, Ivan writes, and he built himself — training his voice and his gestures on recordings of Wijeweera. The article follows him from that apprenticeship to the edge of expulsion, and sets his rise against the rural, under-privileged, low-caste base that both the JVP and the LTTE have drawn into violence and buried.
ප්රචණ්ඩත්වය වන්දනාමාන කිරීම
The JVP rose twice in arms and the LTTE is still fighting; between them more than a hundred thousand are dead, and both movements commemorate their own dead without distinction as heroes. Ivan says the JVP’s transformation into a parliamentary party is good and incomplete: it has not yet given up honouring its own violence, and among the heroes it commemorates are people who killed without reason.
What is More Decisive: Ethnicity or Class?
Ivan argues that Sri Lanka’s crisis is not only ethnic: caste, which the youth commission found behind the second JVP rising, cuts across it. He draws on his own custody after 1971, when he was known as Podi Athula, on the caste make-up of the JVP and LTTE, and on the killing of a school principal during the second insurrection.
වඩා ප්රමුඛ වර්ගය ද? කුලය ද?
Answering Gamini Viyangoda’s criticism of his position on the ethnic crisis, Ivan opens the side of it nobody wants to discuss. The ethnic question is half the truth, he argues, not the whole: the 1971 insurrection, the monks who joined it, the Samasamaja movement, the second insurrection and the killing of Saddhatissa all point to inequality inside the communities as well as between them.
අචේ විසඳුම ම ශ්රී ලංකාවට ද ගැලපේ
Prabhakaran can stop the war as surely as the president can, Ivan writes, and the main obstacle to a negotiated settlement is the Thimpu principles, framed to make negotiation impossible and since treated as its precondition. He sets out the Aceh settlement and what its equivalent would look like here: disarmament, the withdrawal of the additional forces, the high security zones gone, people back on their land and an interim administration until a provincial election.
මහින්ද හා ප්රභාකරන්
The sky is filling with the war’s black cloud and killing as much as possible has become its positive quality. Ivan asks where it ends — whether Mahinda brings Prabhakaran to his knees or the reverse — and answers that the honourable name goes to whichever leader is willing to admit that an injustice was done to the Tamil people and to put it right.
එල්ල වී තිබෙන අභියෝගයට එක්සත්ව මුහුණ දිය යුතුය
The war has entered a new phase and the LTTE has answered by attacking civilians in the south. Ivan distinguishes civilian deaths from air strikes, which may happen, from attacks aimed at civilians, which are chosen — then says the danger now is a second Black July, and that neither suppressing the opposition nor destabilising the government can be justified against it.
රට අවුලට යවා බලය අල්ලා ගැනීමට සිහින දැකීම
The JVP is once again pushing the country towards ruin, Ivan writes, and it is using the formula of 1971 — frighten the villages with an invasion that is coming, then offer an armed movement as the answer. Only the enemy has changed: where once it was an American-backed coup, it is now the United Nations and the West preparing to hand Prabhakaran a state.
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.