The Joint Mechanism and the Coming Political Crisis
Having promised the Kandy aid conference she would sign the joint mechanism for tsunami relief in the north-east regardless of extremist pressure, the President has been called. The JVP, under internal pressure that has made the issue one of survival and dignity, has resolved to quit the government if she signs. Victor Ivan sets out the arithmetic: the JVP’s departure costs 39 seats, the Hela Urumaya’s likely departure another nine, and the Tamil Alliance’s 22 do not cover the gap. Refusing to sign preserves the government but damages her standing internationally, in her party and among the people. Her alternatives are a coalition with a UNP leader who will not strengthen her hand, inducing a large group of UNP MPs to defect — for whom, Ivan notes, she could probably secure judicial protection through the Chief Justice — or dissolving parliament, possibly resigning the presidency and contesting as prime ministerial candidate herself. He judges a parliamentary election would hurt the JVP and Hela Urumaya most, and warns that whichever course she takes the turmoil will not end soon, still less if the LTTE abandons the ceasefire.
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.
The tsunami can become a political tsunami
A month on from the tsunami, Victor Ivan warns that mishandling the recovery could produce a political tsunami destructive to the government and the opposition alike. He attacks the 100-metre coastal buffer imposed by TAFREN: damage reached 400 metres inland at Telwatta and in Galle town while some houses at the water’s edge stood untouched, so the rule bears no relation to where the danger actually lay. It also bites only on the unlucky — those whose houses survive may stay, those whose houses were destroyed may not rebuild — and leaves the displaced waiting in camps for a house in a location of the government’s choosing, or buying land themselves. Pacific nations facing the same hazard do not clear their coasts, relying on warning systems and tsunami-resistant construction instead. Ivan argues that resettlement without consent breaches both UN policy on the displaced and the constitutional protection of private property, and sets out an alternative: let landowners rebuild where they lived, give them the per-capita sum the government would have spent, extend credit to ruined businesses, and revive economic life quickly.
Alliance Government Crosses A Difficult Hurdle
Thondaman’s CWC has brought eight MPs to the Alliance, and with three from the SLMC and one JHU monk the government reaches 118 — enough to govern, but thirty-two short of what the President actually wants. Victor Ivan credits her nerve: she dissolved a parliament the UNP controlled, broke her promise to the Speaker, allied with the JVP at the risk of her own party, and won a gamble that had her survival at stake, while the leader of the opposition remained in a world of his dreams. Her remaining aim is to avoid invalidation at the end of her second term, and Ivan judges that despite her stated preference for abolishing the executive presidency she will instead seek to amend it to permit three terms — a course she can justify to the minorities, to her own party and to the JVP in turn. The arithmetic runs through Prabhakaran: satisfying him on the ISGA delivers the TNA’s twenty-two MPs and brings a two-thirds majority within ten UNP defections. The difficulty is pleasing Prabhakaran and Wimal Weerawansa at once.
Government in a Stalemate
Victor Ivan traces the trap the UPFA government has built for itself. Resuming peace talks would solve both its problems at once — the TNA would support it at least from outside, curing the parliamentary shortfall, and the international aid package would ease the economic squeeze. But the JVP promised the country it would block the interim proposals and shut out Norway, and Ivan concedes their refusal is consistent even if wrong. The SLFP, having called the peace programme a treacherous plan to hand the LTTE a separate state, cannot now embrace it either; nor can the President drop the JVP for the UNP, which holds more seats than her own party and could bring down any government it supported from outside. Even the constitutional change for which she dissolved parliament has lost its constituency. Unable to move, the government buys public opinion with concessions the economy cannot fund, driving inflation and interest rates up on Treasury Bill issues and the rupee down. Ivan closes on Norway’s Vidar Helgesen, who likened the war to a frozen iceberg now melting as the talks collapse.
The UPFA Government’s Future
Two months after the 2004 general election the UPFA still lacks 113 seats, and Victor Ivan sets out why it may never reach them. Thondaman’s CWC is gone, the TNA route is closed by the JVP’s line on the LTTE, and the crossover rule strips defecting MPs of their seats — except the JHU’s bhikkhu MPs, who contested without a party constitution and so cannot be disciplined, though poaching them would provoke the JHU into fury. Until the government proves its majority it can do nothing else, including the new constitution the President dissolved parliament to obtain, and only fourteen months remain before the presidential election. Ivan then turns to the economy, arguing the UNF lost because ordinary people saw no dividend from peace while the business community did, and warning that the end of the garment quota system in December threatens an industry supplying 60% of export income and up to 150,000 jobs at home and in the Middle East. The JVP, he concludes, has shown a clean lifestyle but not yet the maturity its mandate demands, and its fate may prove more tragic than the traditional left’s.
What Can Happen?
Reading the April 2004 election result, Victor Ivan opens with a fable of three fish: the green fish stripped of its dominance by a blue-and-red alliance, and the victors fused into one distorted creature, the red fish triumphant but immobilised by the half of the blue fish it cannot finish swallowing. Beneath the allegory he argues that a real change has begun — the system in which either main party’s turn in office amounted to an official permit to plunder public property may not survive the JVP’s new strength. But he judges the JVP’s positions on the economy and the ethnic question neither progressive nor practical: it accepts decentralisation while rejecting devolution, when only maximum devolution can settle the war, and its coercive route to constitutional change invites Prabhakaran to conclude that a minority may also impose its way. With the SLFP reduced to a dwarf and both leaders’ ambitions evaporating, Ivan proposes an all-party interim administration on an agreed reform programme.
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.
A UNP-PA Coalition in Place of a JVP-PA Coalition?
This article analyzes the strategic political maneuvering between Sri Lanka’s major parties—the UNP, PA, and JVP—over the formation of coalitions and control of the government. It outlines the internal divisions within the PA regarding whether to form a permanent alliance with the JVP to topple the ruling government, or to feign an alliance to eventually form a national government with the UNP. The piece highlights the President’s reluctance for a snap election and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s counter-strategy: maintaining stability to secure international aid for the peace process with the LTTE, and proposing a national referendum on peace to isolate the JVP and foster a UNP-PA coalition.
Doing the best thing for the worst reasons
Victor Ivan analyses the 1993 Southern Provincial Council election, called after the Government’s attempt to unseat Chief Minister Amarasiri Dodangoda and install M.S. Amarasiri collapsed halfway. He argues the Government has inadvertently done the Opposition a favour: the People’s Alliance had been clinging to a one-vote majority that made every member individually indispensable and produced constant in-fighting over portfolios. Examining vote shares across Galle, Matara and Hambantota, Ivan shows the PA-DUNF combination outpolled the UNP by 61,106 votes yet lost the bonus seats to it, and contends that Gamini Dissanayake’s defection will bring the Government little benefit in a province that has not given the UNP half the vote since 1982.