සිරසට එල්ල වූ ප්රහාරය හා ඉදිරිය දැකීම
The attack on Sirasa’s head office in Braybrooke Place makes an ugly picture for the government, which has clashed with the network since the war and appeared to want it punished. Whatever set off this second attack, it looks like a campaign by the government or people connected to it against a media house that backed the opposition at the presidential election. Ivan concedes the government could argue Sirasa obstructed the war — a state may suspend most fundamental rights in wartime, and the power to wage war rests with the state, not with journalists — and notes that the press did not obstruct the campaigns against the two JVP insurrections, saving criticism until afterwards. But the war ended more than six months ago and the President has since won the election too. Supporting Fonseka was not illegal, and the winner is the one who should let old grudges go.
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.
ප්රගතිශීලිත්වය හා ප්රතිගාමිත්වය
A philosophical and historical reflection by the author on their controversial support for the state’s harsh military suppression of both the JVP insurrection and the LTTE. Drawing comparisons to the non-violent civil rights movements of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, the author argues that when armed rebellions become devastatingly brutal and jeopardize society, state counter-violence can sometimes be a progressive necessity rather than a reactionary evil.
යුද්ධයේ අවසානය අත ළඟය, ඊළඟට කුමක්ද?
The war is near its end. The LTTE will have to abandon the civilians it holds and flee to the jungle within days, and nothing remains to it but surrender or destruction, whether or not Prabhakaran is still in the country. Defeating what Ivan calls the strongest and most terrible separatist terrorist movement in the world should earn the forces the respect of Sri Lankans and the world — and he names those to whom it belongs: army commander Sarath Fonseka, the navy and air force commanders, the Defence Secretary who coordinated it, and the President. This was a merciless war against the LTTE but not a war against Tamils, though it caused them temporary suffering and produced excesses, as the campaign against the JVP in the south did. No war can be fought with human rights wholly intact. With every Tamil leader killed by the LTTE, that people is now left without leaders of its own, and must be cared for until they have some.
Who Wins?
Victor Ivan reads the JVP’s place in the Alliance government as a third attempt at the ambition two rebellions failed to deliver. The 1971 rising, aimed at simultaneous attacks on police stations across the Sinhala areas, Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s government put down in days; the second, seventeen years later, killed its opponents methodically and came close to power before the Premadasa government crushed it. Having abandoned armed struggle in 1994 and entered parliament in 2001, the party now holds a share of power it means to convert into the whole. Ivan credits it with persuading the President to seize three ministries and dissolve a parliament the UNP controlled, against her own promise and at the cost of her party, and with using state power and state media unlawfully in the campaign that followed. Each then hoped to use the other and neither can now escape: the JVP cannot leave, the President cannot sack it, and both must ridicule the other to keep their own credibility. Meanwhile the Alliance is bound to a JVP economic programme — state sector, self-reliance, a mixed economy, no privatisation, no interim administration for the north-east — that Ivan thinks belongs to 1970 and has no room in the world today. He expects her to end up playing her father’s part.
Conscience Benumbed
In this article, Victor Ivan argues that decades of mass violence and rampant political corruption have paralyzed the collective conscience of Sri Lankan society. Drawing heavily on the psychological trauma outlined in Prof. Daya Somasunderam’s book Scarred Minds, Ivan asserts that the psychological damage seen in the Tamil community is reflective of a wider distortion affecting all Sri Lankans—victims, perpetrators, and witnesses alike. Using the commercialization and resulting decline of Sri Lankan cricket as an analogy for the state of the nation, the author critiques how governance has become a mechanism for public plunder. Specifically, Ivan highlights the failure of the 17th Amendment, pointing out that constitutional safeguards and independent commissions (such as the Elections, Police, and Bribery Commissions) have been deliberately sabotaged or stalled by the President, with little to no resistance from the judiciary, the political opposition, or a benumbed public.
Caste oppression and youth unrest
Writing on the twenty-second anniversary of the 1971 rebellion, Victor Ivan argues that caste oppression has been an underrated driver of youth revolt in both the south and the north. Drawing on Gananath Obeyesekera, Janice Jiggins and Bryce Ryan’s Caste in Modern Ceylon, he shows that JVP strength concentrated in areas where oppressed castes — Wahumpura, Bathgama, Nekathi — were dense, a pattern the Presidential Commission on Youth Unrest also recorded. These groups entered the capitalist economy late, gained education late, and remain under-represented in Parliament. Ivan extends the analysis to the Tamil militancy, reading it as a struggle against Vellala domination as much as for national freedom, and suggests that both movements refuse to disarm because returning to democratic politics would mean returning to high-caste dominance. A Ravaya reader survey finding the JVP still esteemed by a tenth of Sinhala society leads him to warn of room for a third uprising.