අඬමුද? සිනාසෙමුද?
This article critically examines the controversial tenure and actions of former Chief Justice Sarath Nanda Silva, detailing his abuse of judicial power for personal and political gain. It outlines his role in imprisoning S.B. Dissanayake to appease President Chandrika Kumaratunga, his subsequent legal betrayal of Kumaratunga following a personal insult regarding his behavior toward women, and his intimidation of treasury officials to secure an abnormally high pension. The author also provides a detailed investigative account of a 2004 incident near Diyawanna Oya, where police allegedly found the Chief Justice half-naked in a parked vehicle with a woman, using the cover-up of this event to highlight the systemic corruption and apathy within Sri Lanka’s political, parliamentary, and judicial systems.
හිටපු අගවිනිසුරු සහ ජීඑස්පී ප්ලස් සහනය
The EU has suspended Sri Lanka’s GSP Plus concession, worth 78 million euros in 2008 against exports of 1.24 billion. Government, exporters and commentators alike have forgotten what caused it: two rulings by former Chief Justice Sarath Nanda Silva, the same man now lecturing the country on international law. Under the ICCPR, citizens could petition the UN Human Rights Committee where the highest court failed them, and most complaints heard concerned Silva’s own conduct — among them Tony Emmanuel Fernando, jailed a year for contempt on a false charge after suing over withheld case records, and assaulted in prison the day he was committed. Silva also barred a work-to-rule at the port, which the ILO found breached its convention, and then disparaged that convention in open court with an ILO representative present. Correcting those two wrongs would be enough to recover the concession.
යහපත් අනාගතයක් සඳහා
Sri Lanka should not go on manufacturing new conflicts once an old one ends. Fonseka’s arrest looked at first glance like the winner punishing the loser, but the President’s account is that the army authorities wanted to court-martial Fonseka over matters arising from his time as Chief of Defence Staff, and that he instructed them to wait until after the election so it would not appear he was blocking his opponent from standing. If the process cannot be reversed it should at least be transparent, and a conviction could be met with a pardon in view of Fonseka’s war service. With the war over, the President’s duty is to soften his administration: let the opposition campaign unhindered, invite back journalists who fled, investigate the one who disappeared during the campaign, and legislate on torture and children’s rights — which would also restore GSP Plus.
ජෙනරාල් අත්අඩංගුවට ගැනීම
The timing and manner of Fonseka’s arrest were both wrong. He took 40 votes in every hundred cast against the winner’s 57 — 4,173,185 against 6,015,934 — which makes him, whatever his background, the country’s second accepted leader. Arresting the loser at the close of a presidential election looks like reprisal, and looks worse still while he is challenging the result in court: a move to block the election petition. Military law should apply to serving soldiers, and Fonseka has retired; offences discovered after retirement, if criminal, belong in the ordinary courts. The government has stained its own victory and made a new hero of the man the voters rejected, and his wife Anoma will become a political figure carrying the grievance from platform to platform. The president stopped two earlier attempts at this arrest and was abroad for the third; correcting it is his responsibility, and a test of his character. The example to follow is Dutugemunu’s treatment of the defeated Elara.
ජනාධිපතිවරණය හා නීතියේ පාලනය
The Elections Commissioner has said he may have to withdraw from running the election because his orders are not obeyed — the police ignore him, and state media ignore the Competent Authority. However much authority the constitution grants him, nothing in the country lets him exercise it. This is not new: under Chandrika Kumaratunga an attempt to arrest the Elections Commissioner was stopped only by Attorney General Kamalasabesan’s intervention, and it was Chief Justice Sarath Nanda Silva who advised her to make it. The 1981 Jaffna district council poll was the first time a ruling party seized election administration outright, and Commissioner Jayasekera resigned over it. Since 1982 no election has been free and fair. Powers mean nothing while the ruler declines to obey the law.
අවලස්සණ ජනාධිපතිවරණයක්
Three weeks before the January 2010 presidential election, Ivan argues the contest between Mahinda Rajapaksa and Sarath Fonseka has taken the shape of a fight between two bazaar thugs rather than between democratic forces. Both camps breach the law on cutouts and posters, and neither the police nor the Elections Commissioner will enforce it. He traces the collapse to Chandrika Kumaratunga’s appointment of Sarath Nanda Silva as Chief Justice over the senior Mark Fernando, while corruption complaints against Silva were still before the court. Silva, once the target of a joint UNP–JVP impeachment motion, is now the opposition campaign’s constitutional spokesman. Ivan concludes that defeating a man will not change a system, and no party has said what should replace the executive presidency.
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.
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.
Whither Justice?
A retired army commander and a respected engineer petitioned the Supreme Court over judicial appointments made without constitutional council approval. Victor Ivan records what happened: a bench including the Chief Justice heard the petition and then directed the Attorney General to establish whether the petitioners had abused the judiciary by bringing it. The message, as he reads it, is that nothing the President does may be questioned, and that asking is itself an offence. Neither man belonged to the UNP or sought party advantage; they went to the last place open to a citizen with a grievance about governance. The Court’s first duty is to defend the constitution against an executive assuming powers it does not have, and by making the protection of the President its duty instead it has annulled the constitution without replacing it — leaving the country, Ivan writes, with no fundamental law at all. Similar cases from the Organization of Professional Associations and the People’s Movement for Good Governance have met the same immunity ruling. What strikes him most is who is fighting: citizens who know they will lose, while the UNP, the JVP and the Jathika Hela Urumaya say nothing and parliament will not even debate it. A judiciary that abandons its supervision of the executive, he concludes, brings the country closer to Prabhakaran’s Reich, where no authority may investigate Prabhakaran.
A Country Destroyed by Leaders
Victor Ivan argues that Sri Lanka has become, or is fast becoming, a failed state — a term its academics resist because they fear UN administration, while making no serious intervention to correct the country’s course. His test is the constitution: legislature, executive and judiciary alike decline to respect it, and none treats honouring it as a condition of the system’s survival. The 17th Amendment provides his illustration. A presidential campaign is underway with no elections commission in place, the President having refused to approve a name the constitutional council investigated and cleared. The elections commissioner, past retirement age and unable to leave his post because no commission exists, went to court and was told there was nothing the judiciary could do; parliament did not debate the matter at all. The constitutional council itself has been dormant for months, leaving Court of Appeal vacancies unfilled, with the IGP retiring in November and the terms of the Police and Public Service Commissions expiring. Appointing new members falls to the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition — the two men now contesting the presidency, neither of whom appears interested.