Weerawansa, as Well as Somawansa, is a Bequest of Wijeweera
Written as the JVP split between Wimal Weerawansa and Somawansa Amarasinghe, the piece argues both sides inherit habits Rohana Wijeweera built into the party: raising money from businessmen, hiring out the party’s services and hiding its finances. Ivan recounts what the businessman Yasasiri Kasthuriaratchi told him about his dealings with Wijeweera.
වඩා වැදගත් කවුද?
Ivan discovered on a Friday that most of Ravaya’s ten-member editorial board are Marxists of one school or another. From there he argues the case against: the socialist experiments that failed, Pol Pot’s regime killing people for wearing sunglasses, Wijeweera’s two attempts at armed seizure — and sets against them the India Gandhi made, the largest democracy on earth, beside which he thinks Marx looks small.
ද්රෝහියෙකු ලෙස අභිෂේක කිරීමට නියමිත විමල් වීරවංශ
Weerawansa is the largest political figure the JVP built after its second insurrection, Ivan writes, and he built himself — training his voice and his gestures on recordings of Wijeweera. The article follows him from that apprenticeship to the edge of expulsion, and sets his rise against the rural, under-privileged, low-caste base that both the JVP and the LTTE have drawn into violence and buried.
ජවිපෙ අර්බුදය කොයිබට ද?
The attempt to strip Weerawansa of his position has turned him round to attack the party, and ten of its members of parliament have publicly backed him. Ivan reads it as a split that cannot be contained, predicts where the pieces will go at the next election, and traces the decline to a movement that never acquired the political knowledge its constituency needed.
ප්රචණ්ඩත්වය වන්දනාමාන කිරීම
The JVP rose twice in arms and the LTTE is still fighting; between them more than a hundred thousand are dead, and both movements commemorate their own dead without distinction as heroes. Ivan says the JVP’s transformation into a parliamentary party is good and incomplete: it has not yet given up honouring its own violence, and among the heroes it commemorates are people who killed without reason.
සෝමවංශ සේ ම වීරවංශ ද
The argument inside the JVP matters, Ivan writes, because until it began the party’s spokesmen described it as the cleanest in the country. He reads the sources — Nandana Gunathilaka’s series, Somawansa’s speech at the 1971 commemoration, Weerawansa’s answer in parliament — and works back through the party’s money to the years when its leaders needed intermediaries and protection.
හැරී ගුණතිලක
An obituary for Air Marshal Harry Gunetilleke, who died at seventy-nine. Ivan writes about how honest a man holding office can be, tells the story of the ban a president placed on him and how he had it lifted, and records that having a son as air force commander did not quiet him: he went on saying what he thought in public until he died.
What is More Decisive: Ethnicity or Class?
Ivan argues that Sri Lanka’s crisis is not only ethnic: caste, which the youth commission found behind the second JVP rising, cuts across it. He draws on his own custody after 1971, when he was known as Podi Athula, on the caste make-up of the JVP and LTTE, and on the killing of a school principal during the second insurrection.
වඩා ප්රමුඛ වර්ගය ද? කුලය ද?
Answering Gamini Viyangoda’s criticism of his position on the ethnic crisis, Ivan opens the side of it nobody wants to discuss. The ethnic question is half the truth, he argues, not the whole: the 1971 insurrection, the monks who joined it, the Samasamaja movement, the second insurrection and the killing of Saddhatissa all point to inequality inside the communities as well as between them.
යක්ෂයාට ගිය ජවිපෙ සදාචාරය
Starting from a gift of Li Zhisui’s memoir of Mao, Ivan turns to the morality the JVP claims for itself: the party that says it is the cleanest in the country, and the accounts of extortion from businesses, the sale of party services, and the misuse of money that its own internal quarrel has now brought into the open.