Sri Lanka: Out of the frying pan into the fire
Seventy-two years in four phases, each worse than the last. Victor Ivan totals the debt against government revenue and argues the country has passed from the frying pan into the fire.
Stark darkness
The voters believed they were electing a strongman who would rescue them. Victor Ivan describes a country sliding into a bottomless pit while neither its navigators nor its passengers can see what is ahead.
End of an era?
The pandemic is an accident, not a conspiracy. Victor Ivan argues it has merely accelerated a collapse already under way, and asks whether what is ending is a government or an era.
Turning disaster into a blessing
Sri Lanka’s debt, its import bill for dhal, chillies and milk, its fuel and vehicle costs — Victor Ivan argues the disaster is also the opening, if the public rather than the parties takes the lead.
Darkness and light
A monk asks the diaspora for dollars to keep the government running. Victor Ivan sets the new president’s inheritance against the Yahapalana years and against the murder of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike.
Roots of the crisis
Not the debt alone. Victor Ivan digs for the roots of the crisis in the subsidies handed out for votes, the language policy, the identity-card system and the corruption that has spread through every institution.
Kitchen and the State
Victor Ivan argues that what Sri Lankans eat and how they cook it is a political question — bound up with rural poverty, wasted harvests, crop damage by wild animals, and prohibitions inherited from Anagarika Dharmapala.
Exploitation of rural women
Microfinance, invented to lift the very poor, has become in Sri Lanka a machine for stripping them. Victor Ivan reports from Polonnaruwa and Vavuniya on rural women trapped by collateral-free loans they never used to earn.
සම්බාධක දංගෙඩිය මුවවිට සතුටින් කල් ගෙවන ජාතියක්
With the UN human rights investigation under way, Ivan warns that the government is ignoring the danger of sanctions, which no country has escaped unharmed. A small country’s foreign policy should seek safety, not confrontation with the United States and Europe. He criticises the government’s false show of innocence over alleged wartime abuses and the continuing hardship of Tamils in the North five years after the war.
කළයුත්තේ කුමක්ද?
Quoting Mao that falling into a pit teaches the mind, Ivan asks whether Sri Lankan society learns from its disasters. After defeating Wijeweera’s rising and then Prabhakaran, the country had a chance for an Asoka-like turn from war to reconciliation, but the victor was blinded by triumph. The crisis has taken a new form, hidden behind an illusion of development built on infrastructure and debt. The Rajapaksa government has lost its moral right to rule; the opposition’s first task is a common programme agreed through open negotiation.