විශ්රාම යන ජනාධිපතිනිය සහ රනිල් වික්රමසිංහ
Ranil Wickremesinghe has told his MPs he is thinking of how to use the retiring President’s services, and spoke of American provisions for former presidents. The editorial welcomes cooperation between the two main parties but says retiring presidents must also face scrutiny, since immunity shields them while in office.
කෙළවර කුමක් ද?
The Cabinet has decided to give the retiring President an acre and a half facing the Diyawanna Oya opposite Parliament, in lieu of the pension and official residence she says she will forgo. The note recalls her plan for a Rs 1,700 million presidential palace in the same area.
A Country Destroyed by Leaders
Victor Ivan argues that Sri Lanka has become, or is fast becoming, a failed state — a term its academics resist because they fear UN administration, while making no serious intervention to correct the country’s course. His test is the constitution: legislature, executive and judiciary alike decline to respect it, and none treats honouring it as a condition of the system’s survival. The 17th Amendment provides his illustration. A presidential campaign is underway with no elections commission in place, the President having refused to approve a name the constitutional council investigated and cleared. The elections commissioner, past retirement age and unable to leave his post because no commission exists, went to court and was told there was nothing the judiciary could do; parliament did not debate the matter at all. The constitutional council itself has been dormant for months, leaving Court of Appeal vacancies unfilled, with the IGP retiring in November and the terms of the Police and Public Service Commissions expiring. Appointing new members falls to the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition — the two men now contesting the presidency, neither of whom appears interested.
මහින්ද-අනුර සමීකරණය
In naming Mahinda Rajapaksa as presidential candidate, the President also named Anura Bandaranaike as prime ministerial candidate, which no one had asked for. The editorial reads it as two steps back and one forward in her fight against irrelevance, a fierce chess move, and compares her use of the courts with J.R. Jayewardene’s.
ජනතාවට පොත පෙරළීම
Chandrika Kumaratunga has had her biography written by a well-known biographer, with the publisher’s US$40,000 fee paid by the Ports Authority under Mangala Samaraweera and launches planned from Oslo to Berlin at public expense. Ivan traces the practice to J.R. Jayewardene, then turns to a heartless Parliament and the coming Supreme Court interpretation, noting that everyone has suffered at the Chief Justice’s hands except the President.
The Mahinda – Anura Equation
The President has named Mahinda Rajapaksa her party’s presidential candidate and her own brother its prime ministerial candidate, though only the first nomination was asked for — and done while an amendment making her SLFP leader for life was being introduced. Victor Ivan reads it as a chess move of some cunning: in every sequence of elections, a defeated Mahinda loses even the seat he holds while Anura Bandaranaike emerges as leader of the opposition, and family control of the party survives the defeat. Behind it sits the unresolved question of whether the presidential election falls in 2005 or 2006, and a chain of unanswerable questions about what the Elections Commissioner will decide, whether the President will seek a Supreme Court interpretation first, and what either will do if they disagree. Ivan then turns to the parties themselves, arguing neither main party is democratic — the SLFP run by one family, the UNP by several — and traces the pattern of leaders seeking to escape their term limits: Jayewardene collecting undated resignation letters from a five-sixths majority and dreaming of a third term until Premadasa stood against him, Kumaratunga collecting the same letters from twenty-three deputy ministers in 2000 with the judiciary’s support. Her dreams end, he concludes, only if Mahinda can become a Premadasa.
පිරිවරක් නැති රැජිණට රනිල්ගේ පිහිටයි
Unable to show a winning plan to avoid irrelevance, the President is being deserted; seniors who backed her on the tsunami mechanism are not with her on the candidacy. The editorial suggests she may seek future protection from Ranil Wickremesinghe as J.R. Jayewardene and D.B. Wijetunga once did, and considers Mahinda Rajapaksa’s hardest task: pleasing nationalists and minorities at once.
ස්වාධීන කොමිෂන් සභා මරා දැමීමට ඉඩ දෙමු ද?
Months after the first Constitutional Council’s term ended, no new members have been appointed, and vacancies in the Court of Appeal cannot be filled. Whatever its flaws, the 17th Amendment was an important step towards good governance; the editorial says the commissions matter to the public, not the politicians, and it is for the public to save them.
නැති අවුල් ඇති කිරීම
Rulers who ignore the basic law are a lasting source of Sri Lanka’s political confusion, from the United Front’s new constitution of 1972 to the UNP’s in 1978. Ivan shows that everyone, the Chief Justice included, once accepted that the President’s second term began on 22 December 1999, as the transitional provisions of the 2000 draft constitution confirm, and argues that the election should be held this year.
දාර්ශනික මාක්ස් හා දේශපාලනික මාක්ස්
A reply to Sumanasiri, who holds that Marx the philosopher is not dead. Ivan grants that the world Marx hoped for is more beautiful than liberal democracy, but separates the philosopher from the politician. Drawing on Dmitri Volkogonov’s biographies of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, drawn from the opened Soviet archives, he argues that attempts to build Marx’s world produced tyranny, likens Pol Pot, Wijeweera and Prabhakaran to those figures, and concludes that capitalism cannot be replaced and must be reformed through liberal democracy, his preferred model being Gandhi’s India.