වාර්ගික සමගිය ශක්තිමත් කිරීම
On the morning of the 13th there was a friendly but heated exchange of views between the president and the newspaper editors and heads of media institutions, and one thing the president said with feeling deserves everyone’s attention. From there Ivan works through the defeat of Prabhakaran, the war crimes allegations, and the need to be rid of the politics of division.
තරුණ වෛරය සහ අසහනය
There have been three violent insurrections in Sri Lanka since independence, all of them youth insurrections, two Sinhala and one Tamil. The JVP’s 1971 rising was the first attempt by a political organisation to seize power by armed revolt, and a simple one that the forces put down easily in under a month. What follows is Ivan’s reckoning of where Wijeweera and Prabhakaran belong, and of what there is in all this to be shaken by.
වසන්ත සමයේ අවසානය
Because of the absolute power the presidency gives, leaders who reach it fall in love with the system as a matter of habit. But it was never properly made, and the oppression built into it works not only on the opposition and the public but on the president himself — and what a leader who reaches the office can see is only the sweetness of absolute power, never the poison hidden under it.
ආපසු හැරී බැලීමක් සමග ඉදිරිය දැකීමක්
Ivan sets out his own positions and why they left him isolated. He held that the Tamil rebellion was inseparable from Tamil grievances and had to be settled by negotiation — until it became clear the LTTE would accept nothing short of a separate state or confederation, at which point he supported defeating it militarily. He backed the war publicly and predicted the LTTE’s defeat while most of Ravaya’s own writers argued it could not be won. On the killing and beating of journalists he told colleagues the blame could not be laid wholly on a government unable to move against its army commander mid-war, and was angrily rejected by Sunanda Deshapriya. He records that this was the third insurrection he supported suppressing, including the 1971 rising he took part in himself. At the presidential election his loyalty was to Rajapaksa, whose remaining task he defines as remaking the state and political system.
ජය – පරාජය
The presidential contest can only end with one man winning and the other losing, and the system is built so that struggle runs on hatred rather than argument. Rajapaksa and Fonseka fought Prabhakaran on the same side and praised each other publicly; now each sees a traitor across the field, and the public that cheered both has split into camps that regard the other candidate with the loathing once reserved for Prabhakaran. Given that venom, the losing leader and his senior followers will face reprisal whoever wins. The press profits by fanning it. Beneath this lies a system that keeps one party in power for decades — seventeen years to the first change of government, sixteen so far for this one — long enough for the bureaucracy and police to make common cause with whoever rules.
දූෂණය ගැන වැඩිදුරටත්
Answering replies from Shiral Lakthilaka in Ravaya and Wasantha Wijenayake in Lanka, Ivan denies ever certifying the Rajapaksa administration as clean. His argument was that J.R. Jayewardene’s political system was built to reward plunder, so every ruling party since 1977 has been corrupt by design — and the opposition attacks corruption only to reclaim the right to profit from it. He rejects the claim that corruption cannot be proved without rumour, citing Ravaya’s own documented exposures under previous governments. He then turns to the libel suit Gotabaya Rajapaksa brought against Lasantha Wickrematunge over the MiG procurement story, and states that Wickrematunge’s celebrated posthumous editorial was written after his death by another hand.
යන්නේ කොයිබටද?
The first presidential election after the defeat of Prabhakaran’s de facto state ought to be about what kind of Sri Lanka replaces it, but the campaign has been consumed by trivia and mutual spite. Both main candidates are products of the war they won — Rajapaksa as commander-in-chief, Fonseka as army commander — and neither has said what he would build. Rajapaksa promises a good future without describing it; Fonseka would abolish the executive presidency without saying what succeeds it. Both are asked to address the grievance minorities believe survives Prabhakaran’s defeat, and to explain how corruption can be beaten within a system built to protect it. The press is told to stop staging cockfights.
ජනාධිපති මහින්ද රාජපක්ෂගේ අනාගතය
Winning the election will not save a president who cannot look back honestly at his own record, Ivan argues. He sets the strengths against the limits — the war won, the family’s grip, the corruption and nepotism, the scale of the cabinet — and says the victory was an opening to build a political system worth the name, an opening the president has so far declined.
බල තරගයේ හැඩතල
The picture has changed from one in which the government would win any election easily to one in which it must fight for them. Ivan traces the crisis to the scale of the president’s own coming victory, and argues that the country turned a policy of taking help from the anti-American world into publicly campaigning for it — going so far as to attack Obama, which even China, Iran and Venezuela did not do.
විධායක ජනාධිපති ක්රමය ගැන තවදුරටත්
Ranil Wickremesinghe has written an affectionate essay for J.R. Jayewardene’s 103rd birthday while his party’s official position is that Jayewardene’s creation should be abolished. Ivan takes the essay apart against the record — the referendum, the pardon of Gonawala Sunil, the 1982 district council election run by the ruling party rather than the commissioner, and a bribery commission that in thirty years has convicted nobody.