What Can Happen?
Victor Ivan returns to Johan Galtung’s warning that Sri Lanka might end up temporarily under United Nations administration if it fails to manage its crises. Having read Ivan’s An Unfinished Struggle, Galtung reasoned that a judiciary decayed to that degree implied equal decay elsewhere, and that only a failing state deteriorates so far. Ivan’s test is whether serious mistakes get corrected, and he finds no mechanism that does. An election was held without an elections commission because the President twice refused to approve a list the constitutional council had vetted and cleared; parliament and the judiciary both declined to intervene; and with the council’s own term expired, the police and public service commissions cannot be constituted either, making every transfer, promotion and disciplinary action in those services unconstitutional. A year after the tsunami, 6% of the required houses are built — seventeen years at that rate — and the country cannot yet say how many of its dead were men and how many women. He then reads the party system as collapsing: Thondaman reduced to seeking LTTE shelter, the UNP too decayed to reform itself, the SLFP surviving only on state power. Only the JVP and the LTTE retain vigour, and both, he argues, have spent their history accelerating the state’s decay.
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.
දැන් පවතින තත්ත්වය
A numbered twenty-point programme for the country after the tsunami: facing the challenge with a practical vision, an all-party government for two years, restarting peace talks with interim administration for the North-East that the Muslims can accept, rebuilding ten symbolic towns, reorganising the state, a higher court to settle disputes, and a new constitution before elections.
Overcoming the disaster
Victor Ivan treats the December 2004 tsunami as a test the Sri Lankan state failed. Warning instruments existed and went unused; the armed forces were instructed too late to be effective outside the north-east where they were already concentrated. Forty-eight hours after the waves the government allocated Rs 100 million in urgent relief — a hundred rupees a head for a million destitute — and eight days later the President’s office put reconstruction at Rs 100 billion against the Central Bank’s provisional Rs 400 billion, a sum equal to a full year of government spending or three years of Tokyo consortium aid. In twenty minutes the country lost lives and property comparable to twenty years of war. Ivan argues the two catastrophes cannot be addressed separately, since housing tsunami victims alone would affront those displaced by the fighting, and calls for a two-year all-party government charged with physical reconstruction and with enacting a new constitution — something he thinks civil society will have to compel the parties to accept.
අනුරගේ රස කතා
Anura Bandaranaike has changed his tune about succeeding his sister as the alliance’s presidential candidate. In sections on the constitutional amendment, Chandrika’s tricks, a Ranil who belongs to neither world, and a thunderbolt striking the temple of justice, Ivan argues that the state needs full reform, not reform to save one person from irrelevance, and above all an independent judiciary.
බහු පක්ෂ ක්රමයට රතු එළියක්: විරුද්ධ පක්ෂ මර නින්දේ
On the day of the alliance’s first budget, UNP MP Rohitha Bogollagama crossed over and was made a minister. Ivan explains how the law on crossovers is being bent to reach 113 seats, what the government plans for the Speaker and the constitution once it has them, and why the JVP’s ‘red democracy’ is the main prop of the scheme while the opposition sleeps.
ආණ්ඩුක්රමයේ වෙනසක් සඳහා පොදු එකගතාවක්
Aid pledged at Tokyo depends on peace talks, and the alliance’s first budget has been drawn up without the usual IMF support. The editorial warns against playing with the basic law by a bare majority and argues that reform of the executive presidency should come through consensus, which would also bring a more civilised relationship between the parties.
ව්යවස්ථාව චග්ගුඩු පිටියක් නොවේ
The JVP now seems ready to go any distance to stop the UNP returning to power, and to change the constitution by a simple majority with the courts’ help. Ivan argues that the President and the JVP may fight the UNP within the democratic framework but not outside it, and recalls how the 17th Amendment bill was examined by a three-judge bench that included the Chief Justice.
When must the Presidential Election be held?
Was Chandrika Kumaratunga’s second term due to end in December 2005 or December 2006? Victor Ivan works through the constitutional arithmetic. G.L. Peiris holds that the public oath of 22 December 1999 governs, making the election due in 2005; Mangala Samaraweera replies that a two-term president is entitled to twelve years, placing it in 2006 and resting on an oath the President is said to have taken in secret on 12 November 2000. Ivan tests the twelve-year claim against J.R. Jayewardene, who served two terms and got eleven: having gone to the country early in October 1982, he took his second oath in February 1983 and lost a year. Article 31(3A)(d), quoted in full, sets the term from the date of the oath. He then explains why she took the December oath at all — after the bomb attack on her campaign, her advisers invoked the doctrine of necessity so that her death would not force a fresh election, an insurance that has since become a liability. A secret oath cannot invalidate a public one, he concludes, and any attempt to make it do so will bring on another crisis.
බිබික්කම ලස්සන කිරීම
G.L. Peiris told The Hindu that the UNP backs an executive presidency, but a reformed one. Ivan lists the further reforms such a system would need, recounts how a joint reform proposal failed when Uduwe Dhammaloka Thera’s signed copy never came back, and closes with sections on ‘the Chief Justice of the Dharma State’ and ‘a hunter’s sermon’.