දෙමළ කැරැල්ලක් ආවේ ඇයි? සිංහලයින් ද ආපසු හැරී බැලිය යුතුය
Having asked where the Tamil struggle went wrong, Ivan turns the question on his own
community. He puts the direct cost of the war to 1998 alone at 423 billion rupees and traces
the language question from the cross-party agreement of the early fifties — broken when Sir
John Kotelawala promised parity in Jaffna and the backlash swept both major parties into
Sinhala Only — through Bandaranaike’s twenty-four-hour pledge, the fast of F.R. Jayasuriya,
the unimplemented Tamil Language Act and standardisation.
දෙමළ හදවත්වල ඇති තුවාල සුව කිරීම
The war is over and what it has left is harder than what it settled: one community in the
country now feels itself defeated, and the Tamil diaspora with it. Ivan points to the
Khalistan insurgency, put down in the mid-eighties and followed quickly enough by political
redress that a Sikh is now prime minister of India, and to the rebuilding of German and
Japanese self-respect after 1945. He sets out what can be done at once without new
legislation, and what the camps will require.
සටන්කාමයට වඩා දැන් අවශ්යව ඇත්තේ ප්රඥාවයි
With the LTTE’s territory gone and its leaders holding civilians as a shield, Ivan writes
that the rules of war require a defeated side to surrender — Hitler’s suicide was a signal
to his army to do so — and that Prabhakaran has chosen instead to maximise the harm to his
own people. Whether the forces can take the remaining leaders without that harm will decide
how the victory is remembered, and how India’s election reads it.
දෙමළ සංහාරය ඇත්තක්ද?
Against the claim that the war is a genocide, Ivan sets the arithmetic of the three armed
rebellions the forces have put down. The second JVP insurrection lasted two years and five
months and cost at least fifty thousand lives; the Fourth Eelam War has run three months
longer for perhaps fifteen thousand. He questions the figure of 850,000 Tamils abroad as
evidence of extermination, and notes that fewer than a fifth of the country’s Tamils ever
lived under LTTE rule.
දුම්රිය ගමන හා වේගය
A commuter’s letter about the two and a half hours from Galle to Colombo sends Ivan through
the history of travelling speed, from the ox cart at eight miles an hour to trains that now
exceed three hundred. Sri Lanka had the best railway in colonial Asia and has since
shortened rather than extended it; nine hundred level crossings on a thousand kilometres of
track are what hold the trains back. He recalls Lalith Athulathmudali’s expressway joining
Hambantota to Jaffna, and finds the same instinct in the Yal Devi announcement.
යාල්දේවී නැවත ඇරඹීම
Ivan reads the decision to restore the Yal Devi line to the north as symbolic as much as
economic, and proposes that the sleepers be paid for village by village — each temple,
church, school and workshop buying one marked with its name — so that the south has a hand
in rebuilding the north. What the north needs now, he writes, alongside development and
elections, is kindness.
කැරලිකරුවන් අභිබවා රනිල් ජයගැනීම
Ranil Wickremesinghe has now put down the third revolt against him, and Ivan explains why he
was always going to. The party constitution gives its leader the same absolute power
Sirimavo Bandaranaike used to survive seventeen years out of office — though it cost her the
premiership when the party finally won. The rebels had no agreed leader, and Ranil set
Sajith Premadasa’s name against S.B. Dissanayake’s until neither mattered. They should have
gone after the constitution, not the man.
කර්තෘ සංසදයේ ආචාර ධර්ම හා පුවත්පත් පැමිණිලි කොමිසම
Reading Ian Beales’s review in the Press Complaints Commission’s 2007 annual report, Ivan
sets out a verdict the industry has not answered: four years on, self-regulation stands
still, complaints are few and weak, the newspapers themselves are divided over whether they
want it, and the Editors’ Guild has let its own code go unreviewed. If neither the public it
protects nor the industry that made it believes in it, Beales asks, what future can it have?
එක්සත් ජාතික පක්ෂයේ අර්බුදය
Ivan argues that the UNP’s decline is not Ranil Wickremesinghe’s doing but the working of
the system the party itself built: J.R. Jayewardene designed a machine that would not change
hands, and since 1994 it has kept his party out for fifteen years. Party constitutions
mirror the national one — the leader is above the document, as the president is — and the
party is caught in a trap of its own making.
සාකච්ඡා කිරීම හා සටන් කිරීම
Accused at a public forum of helping the government’s war, Ivan answers by setting out
thirty years of his own dealings with power: the twenty-odd statements he has given the CID,
the night J.R. Jayewardene ordered him to drop a column and the month he obeyed before
resuming it, the raid on the Ravaya office five days after he declined President Premadasa’s
invitation, and the meetings with Chandrika Kumaratunga after attacks on journalists.
Journalists, he argues, should be able to telephone anyone in the country; the fault lies
only in misusing the connection.