Who Wins?
Victor Ivan reads the JVP’s place in the Alliance government as a third attempt at the ambition two rebellions failed to deliver. The 1971 rising, aimed at simultaneous attacks on police stations across the Sinhala areas, Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s government put down in days; the second, seventeen years later, killed its opponents methodically and came close to power before the Premadasa government crushed it. Having abandoned armed struggle in 1994 and entered parliament in 2001, the party now holds a share of power it means to convert into the whole. Ivan credits it with persuading the President to seize three ministries and dissolve a parliament the UNP controlled, against her own promise and at the cost of her party, and with using state power and state media unlawfully in the campaign that followed. Each then hoped to use the other and neither can now escape: the JVP cannot leave, the President cannot sack it, and both must ridicule the other to keep their own credibility. Meanwhile the Alliance is bound to a JVP economic programme — state sector, self-reliance, a mixed economy, no privatisation, no interim administration for the north-east — that Ivan thinks belongs to 1970 and has no room in the world today. He expects her to end up playing her father’s part.
The cat is out of the bag
Two TAFREN advertisements, four days apart, expose what the 100-metre coastal building ban was for. The first, on 27 February, told the country that homes destroyed inside the zone could not be rebuilt and that the government would provide 500-square-foot replacements. The second, on 2 March, exempted buildings permitted before 26 December 2004 by the Tourist Board and other authorities — which may remain, may be repaired, and may be completed if construction had begun. Victor Ivan concludes the rule applies only to ordinary residents, and that its purpose is to clear the most valuable land in the country for the tourist industry. He notes that a Coastal Zone Management Plan already existed, drawn up by specialists, with a conservation zone varying from twenty metres to more than a hundred according to local conditions, and even anticipating a tsunami; the government consulted neither the Coast Conservation Department nor its experts, who are now unwilling to quarrel with those holding absolute power. Coastal residents and hoteliers had coexisted profitably, he argues, and turning the industry into an occupier will serve neither.
The tsunami can become a political tsunami
A month on from the tsunami, Victor Ivan warns that mishandling the recovery could produce a political tsunami destructive to the government and the opposition alike. He attacks the 100-metre coastal buffer imposed by TAFREN: damage reached 400 metres inland at Telwatta and in Galle town while some houses at the water’s edge stood untouched, so the rule bears no relation to where the danger actually lay. It also bites only on the unlucky — those whose houses survive may stay, those whose houses were destroyed may not rebuild — and leaves the displaced waiting in camps for a house in a location of the government’s choosing, or buying land themselves. Pacific nations facing the same hazard do not clear their coasts, relying on warning systems and tsunami-resistant construction instead. Ivan argues that resettlement without consent breaches both UN policy on the displaced and the constitutional protection of private property, and sets out an alternative: let landowners rebuild where they lived, give them the per-capita sum the government would have spent, extend credit to ruined businesses, and revive economic life quickly.
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.
Government in a Stalemate
Victor Ivan traces the trap the UPFA government has built for itself. Resuming peace talks would solve both its problems at once — the TNA would support it at least from outside, curing the parliamentary shortfall, and the international aid package would ease the economic squeeze. But the JVP promised the country it would block the interim proposals and shut out Norway, and Ivan concedes their refusal is consistent even if wrong. The SLFP, having called the peace programme a treacherous plan to hand the LTTE a separate state, cannot now embrace it either; nor can the President drop the JVP for the UNP, which holds more seats than her own party and could bring down any government it supported from outside. Even the constitutional change for which she dissolved parliament has lost its constituency. Unable to move, the government buys public opinion with concessions the economy cannot fund, driving inflation and interest rates up on Treasury Bill issues and the rupee down. Ivan closes on Norway’s Vidar Helgesen, who likened the war to a frozen iceberg now melting as the talks collapse.
The UPFA Government’s Future
Two months after the 2004 general election the UPFA still lacks 113 seats, and Victor Ivan sets out why it may never reach them. Thondaman’s CWC is gone, the TNA route is closed by the JVP’s line on the LTTE, and the crossover rule strips defecting MPs of their seats — except the JHU’s bhikkhu MPs, who contested without a party constitution and so cannot be disciplined, though poaching them would provoke the JHU into fury. Until the government proves its majority it can do nothing else, including the new constitution the President dissolved parliament to obtain, and only fourteen months remain before the presidential election. Ivan then turns to the economy, arguing the UNF lost because ordinary people saw no dividend from peace while the business community did, and warning that the end of the garment quota system in December threatens an industry supplying 60% of export income and up to 150,000 jobs at home and in the Middle East. The JVP, he concludes, has shown a clean lifestyle but not yet the maturity its mandate demands, and its fate may prove more tragic than the traditional left’s.
What Can Happen?
Reading the April 2004 election result, Victor Ivan opens with a fable of three fish: the green fish stripped of its dominance by a blue-and-red alliance, and the victors fused into one distorted creature, the red fish triumphant but immobilised by the half of the blue fish it cannot finish swallowing. Beneath the allegory he argues that a real change has begun — the system in which either main party’s turn in office amounted to an official permit to plunder public property may not survive the JVP’s new strength. But he judges the JVP’s positions on the economy and the ethnic question neither progressive nor practical: it accepts decentralisation while rejecting devolution, when only maximum devolution can settle the war, and its coercive route to constitutional change invites Prabhakaran to conclude that a minority may also impose its way. With the SLFP reduced to a dwarf and both leaders’ ambitions evaporating, Ivan proposes an all-party interim administration on an agreed reform programme.
About the Budget
While this article credits the UNF Government for stabilizing a collapsing economy through strict financial control, it heavily criticizes the administration’s lack of a broader economic vision. The author argues that Sri Lanka must stop thinking like a small island and instead integrate its education and workforce into the global market. Rather than passively relying on the remittances of unskilled laborers while simultaneously exploiting them with excessive passport and agency fees, the government should actively train its youth for skilled international professions—such as nursing—and facilitate affordable foreign education to alleviate local bottlenecks and maximize global economic opportunities.