Choosing destruction instead of salvation
COPE’s daily hearings show where the money went. Victor Ivan notes that everyone is shouting at someone to go home and nobody is asking anyone to take charge.
Self-ruination or salvation
The country hangs on a cord braided from Gotabaya and Ranil — ugly, absurd, and the only one there is. Victor Ivan asks whose fault it was and what escape would actually require.
More about the solution for Sri Lanka’s current crisis
Radio frequencies are public property given away for nothing, and MPs are traders in the state they govern. Victor Ivan uses both to argue that a balance-of-payments fix alone will change nothing.
Another aspect of the crisis
Corruption, not just monetary mismanagement, is what emptied the reserves. Victor Ivan follows the vehicle permits back to J.R. Jayewardene and the predatory system he built around them.
Prime cause of the crisis
On the 74th independence anniversary Victor Ivan finds the public discussion unusually advanced, then argues that Parliament itself is illegally constituted and points to the Jayewardene Centre as the founding example.
Indecency glorified
The land swap, the constitutional frauds, the things presidents do that no civilised country would tolerate. Victor Ivan catalogues indecency raised to the level of ordinary practice.
Is Lanka insane?
A nation, Victor Ivan writes, can go mad the way a person can. The column diagnoses the intellectual paucity behind the debt crisis and sets out what an IMF programme would have to be built on.
Dreaming of the presidency
Victor Ivan turns on the men already planning their presidential runs and asks how anyone can want the office without first proposing to abolish what it has done to the country.
Dr. Neville Fernando and Lankan politics
A conversation from 1991 with Dr. Neville Fernando, recalled at his death, in which a government backbencher explained how Parliament was bought — and why, Victor Ivan argues, it has never recovered.
First, rescue Parliament, then the country
Johan Galtung once told Victor Ivan what Sri Lanka would become. Thirty years on the column takes that forecast as its starting point and argues the Parliament must be rescued before the country can be.