The State and the bulldozer
A state that knows only how to bulldoze: Victor Ivan runs the argument through garbage, schools, paddy land, caste and fake passports, and concludes that structural reform must come before any election.
Putrefaction and end
With the presidential election set for December, Victor Ivan argues that every major leader has an interest in keeping the country unstable until polling day — and that none of them will touch the reforms that matter.
Sri Lanka: Out of the frying pan into the fire
Victor Ivan looks at what the Easter attacks have done to the Muslim community and to the state’s intelligence services, and asks whether a country that has swum in blood for three decades can escape the cycle.
Black Easter
The first column after the Easter Sunday bombings. Victor Ivan sets the attacks against a longer record of political murder and asks what kind of state failed to see them coming.
Anarchy and the collapse of the State
The Executive and the Legislature have disintegrated; the Judiciary may yet find its orders ignored. Victor Ivan reads the state as a machine whose faults were visible, and whose remaining life could have been predicted, long ago.
ප්රමිතිය නොසලකන ජාතියක්
What has come out about the great railway accident at Alawwa on the 17th shows that those responsible gave no thought to the standards that must be considered when trains are bought and put into use. We have heard of motor cars made with fibreglass; we had not heard of railway power sets made with it. A car carries very few people and a train carries thousands.
අන්තර්ජාතික අවුල ලිහාගැනීම
The government had a programme with a strong vision for defeating Prabhakaran’s separatist terrorism at home. It had no such vision for the international questions that would follow the victory: it failed to see them coming, and even once they had become serious it did not manage to build a programme with a strong forward vision for meeting them.
ජනාධිපති මහින්ද රාජපක්ෂ, දෙමළ අර්බුදය හා එක්සත් ජාතීන්ගේ සංවිධානය
The disagreement between Sri Lanka and the United Nations over the war against the LTTE is ripening into something that will go a long way, and personal factors have influenced its growth more than they should have. The way Sri Lanka responded when the UN asked its questions of a member state was neither right nor fair: what was needed instead of anger was a calm explanation.
ප්රඥාවන්ත ප්රවේශයක අවශ්යතාව
The recommendations of the panel of experts appointed by the UN Secretary-General may work as a factor damaging Sri Lanka’s progress, and the challenge arising from them may be as large as the one Prabhakaran posed and more complicated than that. It can still be settled to our advantage, or with the damage kept small, and doing that means changing the whole approach.
ආහාර අර්බුදයට මුහුණදීම
The heavy rain and the flooding it keeps producing have been destructive to the country’s food crops, and this is not a condition peculiar to Sri Lanka. 2011 has already been named a La Niña year, one in which heavy rainfall may do the world great damage, and China — the country with the world’s largest population — has been identified as facing a great drought.