Hatred: barrier for fruitful talks
Will the Ranil-Chandrika dialogue change the political picture? Will it produce even a consensus on the ethnic crisis that has gone on destroying life? Not, Ivan argues, while the hatred each side has cultivated for the other is the one thing both of them still hold in common.
When will wisdom dawn on them?
Even after being elected to it, the President has several times called the executive presidency a dreadful cancer introduced into the body politic. By now proposing to keep that cancer to the end of her own term while reforming the constitution, she has turned the whole reform project into a selfish and ridiculous farce.
Way to peace is found within
Norway has come forward as a facilitator to help Sri Lanka find a way out of the ethnic crisis. Will the Norwegian intervention lead to a solution? Ivan’s answer turns on what both Sri Lankan leaders have already shown they will trade for Prabhakaran’s neutrality.
Is history repeating itself?
When a ruling party acts undemocratically it falls to the official opposition to enlighten its members and the public and turn them into an active force against it. What happens when the opposition cannot or will not is the subject — and the case Ivan works from is the SLFP of the 1980s, read through Mick Moore.
Why president’s office sent an angry reply to me
There is no disgrace for an elephant who breaks his tusks on a diamond rock. Reading the reply the President’s office sent to his answer to her January interview, Ivan writes, he felt they were living in an abuddassa age, in which the diamond rock pursues the elephant in anger and hatred.
Political solutions or political opportunism
Making a constitution implies that the people of a country reach a consensus on the kind of government that suits them. In Sri Lanka it is being done behind their backs: they do not know what is proposed, and the document looks likely to reach them for discussion only after every agreement has been struck.
A new age of terror
The government called the harassment of the singers Rukantha Gunatilaka and Chandralekha Perera a robbery, and the levelling of Anoja Weerasinghe’s house at Moneragala a personal grudge. Set those explanations beside each other, Ivan argues, and a pattern appears that the country has seen before.
Individual power disastrous to democracy
The government will not get a two-thirds majority at a parliamentary election. It can reach the number only by enacting a law that permits crossovers and then holding a referendum — which is precisely what was done once before, and this column is about what that cost.
Ranil’s googly: Presidency out or not out?
The opposition leader’s statement is complicated, but what it says is that despite its reservations his party will not obstruct the draft constitution if the government thinks it has no other course. Whether that is a concession or a googly is the question the column turns on.
Who killed Kumar Ponnambalam?
Kumar Ponnambalam was the most courageous of Sri Lanka’s political commentators. He lived in Colombo among Sinhala people, most of his associates were Sinhala, and knowing exactly what it cost to defend the LTTE from Colombo he went on saying what he thought, fearlessly and well.