අල්ලස හා දූෂණය
The challenge corruption poses to the country’s progress is larger and more tangled than terrorism was. Ivan traces the machinery from the old bribery department to the commission that replaced it in 1994, and then shows what it is up against by following a television station sealed by the defence ministry, a fundamental rights petition heard by the chief justice, and the chief justice’s own name on the resulting company’s board — entered in the register as a social worker.
මැතිවරණ නීති උල්ලංඝනය
Cut-outs and posters after nominations are illegal, and Ivan asks how the law came to be enforced only when the president ordered the police chief to enforce it. He returns to the assets declarations the commissioner could make compulsory and does not, and ends on the death threats to Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, which cost the country goodwill it cannot spare.
විධායක ජනාධිපති ක්රමය ගැන තවදුරටත්
Ranil Wickremesinghe has written an affectionate essay for J.R. Jayewardene’s 103rd birthday while his party’s official position is that Jayewardene’s creation should be abolished. Ivan takes the essay apart against the record — the referendum, the pardon of Gonawala Sunil, the 1982 district council election run by the ruling party rather than the commissioner, and a bribery commission that in thirty years has convicted nobody.
හිටපු අගවිනිසුරු ලක්ෂ 650ක අල්ලසක් ගත්තේද?
The Sunday Leader has reported that the retired chief justice obtained a television station worth 65 million rupees for an institution connected to him from a party to a case before him. Ivan follows the transaction through the licences neither side held, the equipment released from the port, and the pattern of electronic media praising the chief justice while their own cases were being heard in front of him.
සරල දේශපාලනයෙන් ඔබ්බට සිතීම
Every outlet but one spoke with a single voice over the Malabe abduction, and Ivan credits that with the arrests that followed. He turns to a pattern in the reporting of the suicide attacks — on Jeyaraj Fernandopulle, on the president, on Sarath Fonseka — in which the bomber was brought to the place by someone inside, and asks whether the parties can think past defeating each other.
ගවේෂණාත්මක වාර්තාකරණය
Reviewing the first award for investigative journalism at the editors’ excellence ceremony, Ivan sets the winning work — a case that the Accelerated Mahaweli Programme destroyed the Rajarata tank ecology and caused the kidney disease there — against what investigative reporting is defined to be, and argues the ecology had broken down before the Mahaweli reached it. He asks to be corrected if he is wrong.
නිල බලය අයථා ලෙස පාවිච්චි කිරීමට ඉඩදිය යුත්තේ ඇයි?
Six junior officers have been transferred over the abduction and assault of a student at the Malabe technology institute, but the head of the Colombo crime division who directed it has faced nothing. Ivan argues the country needs as firm a policy towards educated men who abuse official power as it does towards uneducated criminals, and asks why the police chief has not acted on the defence secretary’s instruction.
ක්රෙඩිට් කාඩ්වලින් පරෙස්සම්වන්න!
Credit cards are being issued against nothing but a salary slip, and Ivan works through what the interest actually costs the holder who misses the 55-day window. He moves from there to the presidential term and the argument over abolishing the executive presidency, to the displaced, and to the retired chief justice’s habit of delivering popular judgments to rebuild a reputation he might have run on.
යුක්තියේ දෙවොල ගිනි ගැනීම
Harold Laski said a country’s courts measure the civility of its politics. Ivan applies the yardstick and finds it unbearable: politicians who do wrong can at least be voted out, but judges are appointed, and he describes valuable timber confiscated by the courts passed to a friendly monk who sold it and built the chief justice an air-conditioned house.
ජයග්රහණයේ ඵල උපරිම කරගැනීම
The economy will grow simply for the war having ended, but Ivan argues the gains have to be worked for: security relaxed by stages, the paramilitaries and everyone else holding weapons disarmed, and the obstacles foreign investors face — the months an application takes and the bribes paid at each stage — cleared away. The world food crisis, he adds, can be turned to the country’s advantage.