සිදුවූයේ කුමක්ද? විය හැක්කේ කුමක්ද?
Sri Lanka’s throat was caught in two nooses, Ivan writes — terrorism and the political system — and the first is nearly loosed. He explains his own shift: he doubted the account that armed struggle followed the failure of non-violent politics, doubted the Tamil homeland claim, and was moved decisively by the LTTE’s treatment of Ranil Wickremesinghe, who had given them more space than any Sinhala leader and whom they destroyed politically. He defends Rajapaksa’s decision as the most important and most dangerous taken since independence, and argues the war could have gone very differently had the LTTE succeeded in mass suicide attacks, a single trap killing thousands of soldiers, or coordinated massacres in fifty or sixty villages. He then judges the opposition, the courts and the press all to have acted without responsibility, and disputes the reported threatening of Poddala Jayantha and Sanath Balasuriya by the Defence Secretary.
ආධාර කණ්ඩායමේ නව ස්ථාවරය රටට යහපත්ය
Reading the Co-Chairs’ call on the LTTE to lay down its arms, Ivan notes that the European
Union, Japan, the United States and Norway — the parties most opposed to the war — now
accept that the LTTE has been militarily defeated and say nothing of political talks with
it, and argues that their duty is to release the promised aid and help the country with what
follows.
අලුතෙන් හිතන්නට කාලය පැමිණ තිබේ
Sri Lanka is close to winning one of the two decisive questions before it. Where every previous approach had failed and the country was stuck with no end in sight, Rajapaksa made a reckless attempt, staking his own survival and the country’s on fighting the LTTE to a military defeat, and went on down that road against opposition at home and abroad. The world thought he would destroy the country and himself; instead he reached the post he aimed at. The world is changed by those who swim upstream, and until they arrive they are taken for madmen rather than heroes. Military defeat will not settle the ethnic question by itself, but it creates conditions in which it can be settled — and doing so is the shared responsibility of everyone, with the opposition’s duty being to help rather than obstruct. The second question, replacing a disordered political system, needs the same cooperation.
අනාගතය ගැන අලුතෙන් හිතමු
The war’s quick end is now in sight, and the largest remaining problem is how to free the civilians trapped on a small strip of land. The government has declared a no-fire zone, but the LTTE, using those people as a shield, is unlikely to let them cross into it. Once that is resolved the LTTE can only take to the jungle — and the jungle left to it, however thick, is not as large as Thoppigala. Ivan doubts a movement developed to that level can easily revert to guerrilla warfare. The end of the LTTE would widen both the country’s development space and its democratic space: resettlement, rebuilding, provincial and local elections in the north. The most contested question will be what answer is given to Tamil grievances, and it can only be answered if government and opposition work together. The country needs a large change, not a small one.
අඳුරු වලා මැද රිදී රේඛා
Ivan argues the coming military victory will change the picture of the country. The decision to fight the LTTE to a military defeat broke with every previous government’s policy, taken against a recognised ceasefire, an established belief that only negotiation could work, and the near-universal opposition of the donor group — and Rajapaksa’s resolve in holding to it under sustained pressure was, he writes, unequalled. He will enter history as the first leader in the modern world to prove a terrorist movement can be defeated by war, and if he also answers Tamil grievances, as one who did both. The gains will follow: aid for the north and east, tourism, paramilitaries disarmed, the army turned to building roads, high security zones released to their owners. Credit belongs to the service chiefs, above all the army commander, and to a Defence Secretary who could obtain whatever he asked because he was the President’s brother.
යුද්ධයේ අවසානය අත ළඟය, ඊළඟට කුමක්ද?
The war is near its end. The LTTE will have to abandon the civilians it holds and flee to the jungle within days, and nothing remains to it but surrender or destruction, whether or not Prabhakaran is still in the country. Defeating what Ivan calls the strongest and most terrible separatist terrorist movement in the world should earn the forces the respect of Sri Lankans and the world — and he names those to whom it belongs: army commander Sarath Fonseka, the navy and air force commanders, the Defence Secretary who coordinated it, and the President. This was a merciless war against the LTTE but not a war against Tamils, though it caused them temporary suffering and produced excesses, as the campaign against the JVP in the south did. No war can be fought with human rights wholly intact. With every Tamil leader killed by the LTTE, that people is now left without leaders of its own, and must be cared for until they have some.
ඊළඟට කුමක්ද?
The government went to provincial elections meaning to follow them with a parliamentary poll, and had escaped the trap set by the courts over fuel prices; with Kilinochchi taken, everything was falling its way. The Sirasa attack and Lasantha Wickrematunge’s killing two days later have thrown that picture into confusion. Any fair-minded person sees both as the government’s work, and the government’s reply — that it would be mad to do such a thing when conditions favoured it — has an argument in it but no evidence for the conspiracy it alleges instead. Ivan finds no motive on the part of the forces or their commanders, and no evidence tying them to these two attacks, though he accepts a unit attached to them assaulted Keith Noyahr and Namal Perera. Responsibility rests finally with the President as commander-in-chief. Sri Lanka investigates nothing seriously: even the site of Premadasa’s assassination was washed down at once.
භයානක ප්රවණතාවක
Amid the army’s advances in the north, Ivan writes, what is heard in the south is terrifying. A Claymore mine was used against Sirasa’s operations room on the 6th, detonated remotely — and only the security forces and the LTTE possess Claymores or know how to handle them. Two days later four men on two motorcycles stopped Lasantha Wickrematunge’s car and shot him in the head. Journalists commonly believe both attacks, and two earlier assaults, were the work of the security forces, though they do not say so publicly. Ivan grants the forces their role and their sacrifice, and asks journalists to be sensitive in wartime — but argues that using power against critics earns no public respect, and that the government’s decision to look away after Keith Noyahr and Namal Perera were attacked is now costing it dearly.
2009 වසර හා දේශපාලන අංක ගණිතය
Ivan opens 2009 expecting the global collapse to hit Sri Lanka hard. The year begins with the Golden Key crisis dragging the rest of Ceylinco’s finance companies down, tea, cinnamon and rubber in unprecedented difficulty, and smallholders who once earned well unable to live. War spending for 2009 is 177 billion rupees, and the country must fight through an economic crisis it cannot abandon the war to escape. At Kilinochchi the army advances slowly through bunds, trenches and traps, its target the LTTE’s war machine rather than territory. Meanwhile a run of court rulings against the government, above all on fuel prices, had trapped it politically — until it escaped by cutting fuel, gas and official expenses in one package worth 16 billion rupees, and put the opposition on the defensive instead. Ranil is the better mathematician; Mahinda is the better political arithmetician.
Mahinda’s Anti-Tiger War and the Future of the Tamil People
With the army closing on Kilinochchi, Ivan asks what the war means for the Tamil people. No government can concede a separate state or confederation, he argues, and the traditional homeland claim blocks negotiation. He sets the LTTE’s military strength against its political failures and asks who benefits from the war.