Defeating Mr. President All But Impossible
Despite corruption, rights abuses, nepotism and rising prices, Ivan argues that President Rajapaksa is almost impossible to unseat before the presidential election of 2011. The UNP can defeat the budget only with the JVP, which gains too much from the government to risk it, and the rules of the system favour the President over the opposition.
Mangala’s Unfinished Revolution
Mangala Samaraweera’s revolt against President Rajapaksa has hurt the regime, but Ivan finds it neither consistent nor honest. He compares it with the 1991 impeachment move by Athulathmudali and Dissanayake, and reminds readers of the share Samaraweera took under Kumaratunga and of the waste in the institutions he controlled.
The Future is Uncertain
Victor Ivan finds the President immobilised. He cannot abandon the JVP after the support it gave him at the presidential election, yet dropping it would mean placing full faith in Ranil Wickremesinghe, whom he does not trust; and a president dependent on the JVP is trapped in its framework, as Chandrika Kumaratunga discovered. Neither party can transform the other, so nothing moves without the JVP’s consent. Ivan sees the same deadlock between the government and the LTTE, each blocked by India — which will permit neither the oppression of Tamils in the north and east nor a separate state. He puts the negotiating gap in a simile: the LTTE asked for tens of thousands of buns, was offered thousands, refused, and is now invited to the table for one. A government proposing decentralisation within a unitary framework is offering less than the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact of 1958, and cannot raise the offer while the JVP and Hela Urumaya hold it in place. With no negotiated route left, Ivan warns the LTTE may settle accounts by war and may seek borders drawn by community — an attack on the Sinhalese of the East making it impossible for Tamils to live in the south, and opening the way to massacre and mutual slaughter.
The President and the JVP
Victor Ivan argues that unless Mahinda Rajapaksa resumes talks in defiance of the memoranda he signed with the JVP and the Jathika Hela Urumaya, war will return. He has already tested the limits: Norway remains facilitator despite an undertaking to remove it, talks look likely outside Asia against a condition that they be held within it, and Anton Balasingham has been summoned without objection. But Ivan doubts the JVP will let him go much further, and explains why its leaders cannot retreat even if some now privately doubt their own conditions — admitting error would expose them to their own members as politically shallow, so they must keep defending a position that no longer fits. The President’s first problem, he writes, is choosing between the JVP and the country. He then draws the parallel with Chandrika Kumaratunga, freed from the UNP’s encirclement by the JVP only to find herself in its prison instead, and notes that Rajapaksa faces the same choice in far better conditions: the UNP fragmented, its alliances weakened, and the LTTE no longer friendly to it.
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.
රනිල් වික්රමසිංහ සහ එක්සත් ජාතික පක්ෂය
Ranil Wickremesinghe’s handling of the revolt against his leadership is remarkable: twice before he saw off rebellions by handing out sweets. Ivan explains how party leaders reap hundreds of millions in black money at elections, and applies Mick Moore’s analysis to both Wickremesinghe and his challengers.
ලැජ්ජා නැතිකමේ දේශපාලනය
Even after Mahinda Rajapaksa’s election, Chandrika Kumaratunga will not give up the party leadership, and Ranil Wickremesinghe clings to his despite telling friends he would quit. Ivan recounts what a CID officer told him in confidence during the terror that followed the 1999 election, and ends by wishing that she not be jailed and made to suffer for what was done in her eleven years of rule.
වේළුපිල්ලේ ප්රභාකරන් හා රනිල් වික්රමසිංහ
The LTTE is turning from talks back to war, and it is still unexplained why it wanted Ranil Wickremesinghe defeated. Wickremesinghe trusted the TNA and the Tamils to back him without conditions; Ivan concludes that a Prabhakaran who was half-way to good has been pushed somewhere worse, and Wickremesinghe can no longer claim to be the leader who won Tamil trust.
ඡන්ද අයිතිය සමග සෙල්ලම් නො කළ යුතු ය
Many people who voted at earlier elections found their names missing from the register this time. The editorial says the official explanation is not a fair answer and calls on the Elections Commissioner to find out what happened, who is responsible, and explain it to the country.
ප්රභාකරන්ගේ වීර දින පණිවුඩය
President Rajapaksa reads Prabhakaran’s Heroes’ Day speech as an offer of friendship. Ivan argues that it was Prabhakaran, not the Sinhala voters or the SLFP, JVP or Hela Urumaya, who decided the election, blocking Ranil Wickremesinghe’s ‘peace with traps’ in favour of a candidate of ‘pure war’, and warns of a new Gemunu–Elara war or rebellions within the south.