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.
සෝමවංශ සේ ම වීරවංශ ද
The argument inside the JVP matters, Ivan writes, because until it began the party’s spokesmen described it as the cleanest in the country. He reads the sources — Nandana Gunathilaka’s series, Somawansa’s speech at the 1971 commemoration, Weerawansa’s answer in parliament — and works back through the party’s money to the years when its leaders needed intermediaries and protection.
හැරී ගුණතිලක
An obituary for Air Marshal Harry Gunetilleke, who died at seventy-nine. Ivan writes about how honest a man holding office can be, tells the story of the ban a president placed on him and how he had it lifted, and records that having a son as air force commander did not quiet him: he went on saying what he thought in public until he died.
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.
Where the LTTE Went Wrong
Ivan argues that the LTTE, like the JVP in 1989, failed to trade armed struggle for politics when it held the advantage, and helped elect the government now bent on crushing it. He compares Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s role against the LTTE to the ruthless suppression of the second JVP uprising and concludes that armed struggle brings only blood and destruction.
චන්ද්රිකා හා රනිල් ගැන වැඩිදුරටත්
Ivan is glad his articles on Ranil Wickremesinghe and Chandrika Kumaratunga have stirred debate. One reader told him why Wickremesinghe protected her: she published the Batalanda Commission report without a chapter concerning him, and videos of abuses ordered from the President’s House are said to exist.
නිර්භීතකමේදි ඇයට හිමි තැන අසමසමය
For all her failings, Chandrika Kumaratunga was unmatched in courage. Ivan tells how he learned of the Suriyakanda mass graves from a young engineer who came to Ravaya in 1993, how the exposure unfolded, and reproduces the verse appeal to mothers, sisters and daughters that she signed; he concludes that Suriyakanda mattered to her for its usefulness rather than its meaning.
ඉතින් මැතිනියනි ඔබට ආයුබෝවන්
The worst story about Chandrika Kumaratunga’s honesty came from Le Monde’s Delhi correspondent, puzzled by the degrees listed in her official biography after 1994. Ivan then recalls the impeachment plan of 1991, in which all three main actors lived in dream worlds, and how the exposure of the Suriyakanda mass graves brought the rising Kumaratunga great fame.