What is going to happen?
Writing days before the April 2004 parliamentary election, Victor Ivan argues that no result can reduce the country’s instability. Two nationalist blocs have each split — the Jathika Hela Urumaya’s monks drawing away from the JVP’s claim to represent Sinhala nationalism, and Karuna’s break dividing the Tamil National Alliance between north and east. If no party reaches 105 seats, the balancing seats cannot come from the TNA, since courting Prabhakaran means fighting Karuna and courting Karuna means fighting Prabhakaran. Ivan sets out the manoeuvres open to Chandrika Kumaratunga and Ranil Wickremesinghe in each scenario, warns that a prolonged failure to form a government would weaken the economy and the rule of law and choke off international aid, and notes that Prabhakaran — who had watched the earlier crisis with amusement — is now as bogged down as the two leaders he was observing.
රට යන්නේ විනාශයටය
The President wants to avoid political irrelevance at any price; the Prime Minister wants to keep the executive presidency so that he can inherit it. The editorial warns that this power struggle could end in anarchy and in the LTTE gaining freedom to act without a negotiated settlement.
How will the struggle for power end?
In this article, Victor Ivan analyzes the escalating power struggle between President Chandrika Kumaratunga and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. Facing the end of her term and unable to contest the next presidential election, the President seeks to overhaul the executive presidency to secure her continued political dominance, potentially by aligning with the JVP or utilizing Parliament as a constituent assembly. Conversely, the Prime Minister is determined to preserve the current system to claim the executive presidency for himself, plotting to render the President politically irrelevant. Ivan warns that this clash of ambitions, coupled with a lack of faith in the impartiality of the judiciary under Chief Justice Sarath Nanda Silva, risks plunging the nation into an extra-constitutional crisis and potential civil conflict.
රැලේ සාමාජිකයින්ට පිස්සු නටන්නට ඉඩ හැර බලා සිටීම
The editorial credits Ranil Wickremesinghe with opening roads, keeping calm in the face of the President’s outbursts and internationalising the peace effort, but faults him for failing to discipline his team. It lists reports of ministers and MPs assaulting police, freeing detained supporters and demolishing a Matara sports club building, with endless inquiries and no action, and warns that repeating the lawlessness tolerated under Chandrika Kumaratunga would be ruinous.
A Snap Election
In a climate where peace hangs by a thread, the looming threat of a snap election promises not a democratic transition, but a destructive contest of death. Caught in a bitter, bilateral deadlock, the Executive President and the Prime Minister are poised to drag the nation into a mad struggle for supremacy. With the LTTE watching warily from the wings, an election waged in the “law of the jungle” risks plunging the exhausted country back into anarchy. To prevent this impending peril, civil society must forcefully demand a civilized consensus—a unified, all-party commitment to structural reform, independent electoral oversight, and a non-military resolution—before the ballot box is completely broken by the barrel of a gun.
Dirty politics undermine sovereignty of people
The rule of law is essential to the survival of a democratic political system, and when the rule of law is broken the system is damaged with it. What follows is a list of the specific breakages, with figures.
Who was responsible for the Mawanella disaster?
There is a saying that if you go to sleep with dogs you wake up with ticks, and the government is in that position now. What happened at Mawanella, and who let it happen, is followed here from the local politics up to the immunity of the President.
Exorcise the evil system
Sri Lanka signed the United Nations convention against inhuman and degrading treatment in January 1994 and passed an Act to give effect to it in November of the same year. What has happened since to the people the Act was written for is the subject of the column.
රටට අරාජිකත්වයක් අවශ්ය නැත
The editorial warns that if the parliamentary election is not free and fair, people will lose faith in the political system and the result will be anarchy. It rejects the government’s claim that six elections under it were fair, citing more than 100 armed booth captures in the 1997 local polls, the North Western provincial poll, and notes that no one was punished. It condemns attacks on the Elections Commissioner and the rejection of an EU call for an independent commission, and urges civil society to secure a fair poll.
A society without a conscience
What Sri Lanka faces is a crisis of conscience. The things that separate a man from an animal are the ability to think independently and the conscience — and the organisations that exist to exercise both have gone quiet at exactly the moments they were needed.