Performance that does not match words
The LTTE has rejected the existing social contract and is fighting for a new one and a new state. Since the end of that could be the break-up of the country, the government tried to crush the rebellion by war, and having found that hard has had to offer to amend the contract instead.
The inherent limits of the Norwegian peace initiative
The Norwegian attempt to bring peace to Sri Lanka is being discussed from every point of view. What the column sets out is what a third-party facilitation can and cannot reach — and why India’s own intervention carried the limits it did.
External powers and internal undemocratic activities
It is welcome that the external powers interested in a solution are looking past Prabhakaran’s extremism to the anti-democratic conduct of the Chandrika government. The American Deputy Secretary of State has gone beyond refusing to recognise an Eelam state to saying his government wants free and fair elections and protected freedom of expression.
Can India be a genuine aide?
India has said it is ready to intervene as a third party if both sides ask. Both sides have stayed silent; only some of the bhikkhus who once rose against the Indo-Lanka Pact, and the leader of the opposition, have answered favourably. Whether India can be a genuine helper is the question the column puts.
Politics behind Neelan’s martyrdom
Neelan Tiruchelvam, one of the main authors of the government’s devolution package, was assassinated just as the constitutional amendment carrying it was being brought before parliament ahead of a snap presidential election. The LTTE is plainly responsible — and what Ivan examines is what the government did to make the package unpassable long before the killing.
ද්රවිඩ ජනයා – ලංකාවේ වමට අභියෝගයක්!
Writing in 1979, Victor Ivan challenges Sri Lanka’s Marxists — reformist and radical alike — over their deliberate silence on the Tamil national struggle in the north. They mount poster campaigns and solidarity rallies for oppressed nations abroad, he observes, yet stand mute before a struggle on their own doorstep. He tests their consistency against Bangladesh: the Awami League was no Marxist movement, but the Left correctly backed its independence struggle, measuring the case by whether the people were oppressed rather than by the class character of their leadership. Why, he asks, does that yardstick stop at Jaffna? Rejecting the equation of oppressor and oppressed nationalism — one cannot equate the Black Panthers with the Klan — Ivan argues that the Left’s opportunist alliance with Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism is what makes it unable to support a just demand, and that only by joining the struggle rather than lecturing it from outside can Marxists rebuild the broken Sinhala-Tamil unity.