Anarchy must be averted
Blackouts, queues and no plan. Victor Ivan argues that Sri Lanka is constitutionally primitive, and that an interim constitution is the only way to keep the collapse from becoming anarchy.
The struggle of the youth, what will be the end?
The New Year dawned with the Central Bank declaring bankruptcy. Victor Ivan puts the hard question to the protesters: if GotaGoHome succeeds, what exactly will have changed?
The mass uprising: What could be the outcome?
Written a week after Mirihana. Victor Ivan reads the protest movement as a direct democratic uprising and asks what it can actually win, beyond removing one man.
More about the solution for Sri Lanka’s current crisis
Radio frequencies are public property given away for nothing, and MPs are traders in the state they govern. Victor Ivan uses both to argue that a balance-of-payments fix alone will change nothing.
Overcoming the crisis
A programme in two phases: go to the IMF, bring the Government into a reform process, pass an interim constitution, and complete the new one by referendum. Written as the queues were forming.
Another aspect of the crisis
Corruption, not just monetary mismanagement, is what emptied the reserves. Victor Ivan follows the vehicle permits back to J.R. Jayewardene and the predatory system he built around them.
Sri Lanka on the brink of anarchy
Written weeks before the fuel queues turned into protests. Victor Ivan traces the fertiliser theory back to the two men who sold it, and says the country will soon be declared bankrupt.
Prime cause of the crisis
On the 74th independence anniversary Victor Ivan finds the public discussion unusually advanced, then argues that Parliament itself is illegally constituted and points to the Jayewardene Centre as the founding example.
The rough sea, sinking ship and the captain
A novice captain took the helm in the worst weather at sea. Victor Ivan reads Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s presidency that way, then turns to Geiger and the curse laid on kings in the chronicles.
The elephant, goat and the rope
Rohan Samarajiva answers back, so Victor Ivan sets out the case against independent commissions in detail, drawing on India and Hong Kong to show what an appointing body has to be before it can work.