පළමු වටයේ ජය ජනාධිපතිනියට
The President has cleared a hard hurdle. Allying with the JVP let her defeat the UNP ‘army’ that had surrounded her, but left her a prisoner of the JVP; with the JVP gone she now has two paths, and the editorial argues that a parliamentary election would hurt the JVP and the Hela Urumaya most.
තමන්ගේ අය බලා ගැනීම
Sri Lanka’s democracy is more feudal than bourgeois: voters choose parties not for policies but because ‘our party will look after us’, and are rewarded with privileges when it wins. The editorial calls this corrupt system a cause of the country’s misfortune and a barrier to civil society.
ජනාධිපතිවරණය
Must the next presidential election be held at the end of this year, as Ranil Wickremesinghe says, or next year, as the President says? The dispute arises from her two swearings-in, publicly in 1999 and secretly in 2000. The editorial traces the tangle to the Chief Justice and notes that the Elections Commissioner who must resolve it is past retirement age and in poor health.
රට තිබෙන්නේ ඛේදජනක තත්ත්වයක යි
With the JVP gone, the government has no majority. The forces gathered around the alliance had no vision beyond defeating the UNP, the parties have no internal democracy and train autocrats, and although an election is near, the Elections Commission has still not been set up.
The Joint Mechanism and the Coming Political Crisis
Having promised the Kandy aid conference she would sign the joint mechanism for tsunami relief in the north-east regardless of extremist pressure, the President has been called. The JVP, under internal pressure that has made the issue one of survival and dignity, has resolved to quit the government if she signs. Victor Ivan sets out the arithmetic: the JVP’s departure costs 39 seats, the Hela Urumaya’s likely departure another nine, and the Tamil Alliance’s 22 do not cover the gap. Refusing to sign preserves the government but damages her standing internationally, in her party and among the people. Her alternatives are a coalition with a UNP leader who will not strengthen her hand, inducing a large group of UNP MPs to defect — for whom, Ivan notes, she could probably secure judicial protection through the Chief Justice — or dissolving parliament, possibly resigning the presidency and contesting as prime ministerial candidate herself. He judges a parliamentary election would hurt the JVP and Hela Urumaya most, and warns that whichever course she takes the turmoil will not end soon, still less if the LTTE abandons the ceasefire.
දේශප්රේමී පෝස්ටර් හා දේශද්රෝහී පාප්ප
The JVP has the country’s best poster machine and spends more on posters than anyone. Ivan mocks its latest campaign, then turns to the question of who the alliance’s presidential candidate will be: the President will not give up her wish to avoid irrelevance, but in a close contest between Mahinda Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe, Rajapaksa is more likely to win.
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.
රට යන්නේ අරාජිකත්වයට ද?
JVP and SLFP local leaders in Galle are fighting over who will build the town’s bus stand: the JVP says the SLFP chief minister’s Rs 4.1 million plan could be done for Rs 500,000. Despite lamps lit together for unity, the editorial finds no unity even within the government, and every institution sliding into greater confusion while Parliament loses control of public money.
විපතේ විශාලත්වය හා පක්ෂවල පුංචිකම
Nearly 50,000 dead and close to a million displaced in under an hour: Ivan argues that a disaster of this scale should make the parties see that none of them can solve it alone. Events are defying everyone’s calculations and leave no room for heroes; only a joint national programme can overcome the disaster and prevent a ‘political tsunami’.
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.