පුවත්පත් මණ්ඩල ක්රමය නැවත ඇති කිරීම
The Press Council was left dormant in 2002 so that the industry could regulate itself, and is now being revived. Ivan sets out what is wrong with the law — registration of every owner and editor, renewable yearly — and what is wrong with the self-regulation that replaced it, and concludes that the media organisations’ only course is to negotiate a single institution in which the government also has a share.
පෝද්දල ජයන්තට පහරදීම
After a television programme used footage of Poddala Jayantha and Sunanda Deshapriya while
alleging that some journalists were paid by the LTTE, Poddala came to Ivan and asked him to
intervene. Ivan describes what he did, what the president said when the question was put to
him, and why he thinks naming such journalists would have been ruinous — and argues that the
fault can only be corrected by looking critically back at the policy that produced it.
ජාතිවාදය බෙදුම්වාදය හා කල්ලිවාදය
Ivan takes the president’s promise that there will be no more room for separatism — and,
importantly, for racism — as the right formula, since each feeds the other. The victory
should produce humility rather than triumph, and the test of it is whether wrong opinions
are defeated by argument rather than by threat, and whether thinkers, journalists and
artists can say what they think without fear for their lives.
යුද්ධයෙන් ජයගැනීම හා ප්රචාරක යුද්ධයෙන් පරාජය වීම
The government won the war for territory and lost the argument about how it ended. Ivan
credits it with everything the military victory required — rebuilding the forces’ morale,
ending the factionalism among them, holding to the decision under international pressure —
and finds the same government without a case it could put to the world, when the strongest
argument was available to it: that letting a movement succeed by holding hundreds of
thousands hostage teaches the lesson to every other city.
මහජනයාගේ පරමාධිපත්ය බලය සමග සෙල්ලම් කිරීම
The elections commissioner has asked voters not to vote for candidates accused of thuggery
and corruption, and Ivan asks how they are supposed to know who those are. India requires
every nomination to carry a sworn statement of assets and of cases pending; Sri Lanka has an
assets law that is not enforced and no ceiling at all on spending, while some Western
Province candidates have spent three or four hundred million rupees.
කර්තෘ සංසදයේ ආචාර ධර්ම හා පුවත්පත් පැමිණිලි කොමිසම
Reading Ian Beales’s review in the Press Complaints Commission’s 2007 annual report, Ivan
sets out a verdict the industry has not answered: four years on, self-regulation stands
still, complaints are few and weak, the newspapers themselves are divided over whether they
want it, and the Editors’ Guild has let its own code go unreviewed. If neither the public it
protects nor the industry that made it believes in it, Beales asks, what future can it have?
සාකච්ඡා කිරීම හා සටන් කිරීම
Accused at a public forum of helping the government’s war, Ivan answers by setting out
thirty years of his own dealings with power: the twenty-odd statements he has given the CID,
the night J.R. Jayewardene ordered him to drop a column and the month he obeyed before
resuming it, the raid on the Ravaya office five days after he declined President Premadasa’s
invitation, and the meetings with Chandrika Kumaratunga after attacks on journalists.
Journalists, he argues, should be able to telephone anyone in the country; the fault lies
only in misusing the connection.
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.
ගන්ධබ්බ තත්ත්වයකට පත්ව සිටින ජනමාධ්යවේදීන්
The Sirasa attack and Lasantha’s killing have frightened journalists, some of whom have already left the country, and many now speak of a terrible new era. Ivan argues it is not new: every administration since 1978 has done this. Under Jayewardene no mainstream paper criticised the government even over the opposition leader’s civic rights, the hooting of Supreme Court judges, or the pardon of Gonawala Sunil; only opposition papers did, and they were sealed and prosecuted for criminal defamation. Under Chandrika Kumaratunga, whom journalists helped bring to power, Satana’s editor Rohana Kumara was shot in circumstances close to Lasantha’s, and Lasantha himself was beaten and his house fired on. Yet the press has now cast her as saviour, and made Mangala Samaraweera — once the symbol of media repression, whose effigies they burned — the chief mourner. Journalists forget, and in forgetting protect the system.
ලසන්ත වික්රමතුංග
Ten days after the murder, Ivan writes about a friend he had fallen out with. Lasantha was the finest investigative journalist Sri Lanka has produced — the instinct, the persistence, the ability to read what documents concealed — but the politician inside him was a small man, wielding the pen to install a UNP government in which he expected a senior ministry. He exposed his opponents’ corruption without mercy and covered up his own side’s. Ivan recounts the 1999 Town Hall bomb, when both were to be arrested and they packed bags for Singapore until Ranil Wickremesinghe called Lasantha back; Chandrika Kumaratunga’s later claim that she stopped a minister’s plan to kill them; and the quarrel over her interview and Ivan’s book that soured the friendship. Assassination, he writes, gave the life its meaning.