topic: Anarchy

අරාජිකත්වයේ අත්තිවාරම්

Ivan argues that the government, lacking any theory of how rotten the whole system had become by the end of the war, is watching it collapse piece by piece into anarchy. Its answer to a corrupt police — sending the army, as at Rathupaswala — is worse than the disease. Champika Ranawaka’s own column describes a lumpen rich and a super-bureaucracy; the judiciary rotted under Sarath N. Silva; tax collection has collapsed into VAT fraud; and debt-funded infrastructure, the lost GSP+, the DCD milk-powder scare and the anti-fertiliser campaign over kidney disease all speed the slide.

නූරිය අනාගතයේ ප්‍රතිබිම්බයක්ද?

The crimes exposed at Nooriya estate in Deraniyagala, after the murder of superintendent Nihal Perera, show a former Pradeshiya Sabha chairman ruling like a ‘little Prabhakaran’ for a decade — killing, raping and burning homes under the protection of the provincial Chief Minister and the police. Ivan traces this to the fusion of politicians and criminals that began when MPs were allowed private security squads during the JVP and LTTE insurgencies, fuelling a black economy that now finances the parties. Without a sweeping reorganisation of the state, he warns, the whole country could become a Nooriya.

අරාජිකත්වයේ අභියෝගය

Ivan reads the weeks since Vesak as signs of a country drifting into anarchy: rotten institutions are collapsing with nothing to replace them. A monk’s staged self-immolation, sold to television by a journalist as an exclusive; a Deputy Inspector General, Vass Gunawardena, exposed as a kidnapper and contract killer; the fusion of politicians and the criminals who guarded them during the insurgencies; and a push to scrap the Thirteenth Amendment unilaterally. He traces Indo-Lankan hostility to the UNP’s 1977 insults to Indira Gandhi and warns that breaking the Accord would complete the slide.

මගේ සිහිනය ගැන වැඩිදුරටත්

Replying to readers’ reactions to his plan to reorganise Ravaya, Ivan explains his habit of seeing things unconventionally, as Gandhi and Mandela did, and sets his plan against his forecast that Sri Lanka is heading for anarchy. After Prabhakaran’s defeat the political system stood exposed; Mahinda Rajapaksa, the only leader left, failed to rebuild the state, and parties on both sides are historically spent. With a monk’s self-immolation over cattle slaughter and the row over the Thirteenth Amendment as signs, he argues Ravaya must be strengthened to guide readers through the coming collapse.

නීතියක් නැති රටකට!

With the impeachment of the Chief Justice reaching its climax, the paper sets aside ordinary reporting to list, in twelve numbered points, the consequences of pressing ahead in defiance of rulings by the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal. It rejects the government’s comparisons with the Philippines and Westminster, warns that a new Chief Justice installed over a lawfully protected one would bring repression and chaos into the courts, and predicts damage as grave as the 1982 referendum and Black July.

අවිචාරය, උද්ධච්චකම හා අශීලාචාරත්වය

Ivan argues that by ignoring the judgments of the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal in the impeachment of the Chief Justice, the government has done what no previous government dared, destroying both the courts’ legitimacy and its own. He traces the Supreme Court’s power to interpret the constitution and the ancient reach of the writ jurisdiction, recalls the Bracegirdle case under colonial rule and Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s certiorari against J.R. Jayewardene’s commission, and warns, with Musharraf’s Pakistan as the precedent, that two rival Chief Justices could now follow.

අපරාධකරණය හා පාදඩකරණය

The clash at Kolonnawa on polling day between the government member Duminda Silva and the former member and presidential adviser Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra, and the tragedy that came of it, is a powerful event that gives a warning signal not only to the president and his party but to every political party in the country and to the society.