රටට වෙනස්කම් අවශ්යද?
Given how rotten the political system and state administration had become, Ivan writes, winning the separatist war should be counted a miracle — the armed forces and police included people working for the LTTE for money, which shows how far the institutions had decayed. The question now is whether to go forward with that rot or reform it. Every important part is corroded: legislature, executive, electoral system, courts, public service, public services, media. The President has accepted change is needed but has set out no philosophy beyond the voting system and cabinet size, and it is unclear whether he means to win two-thirds by agreement with the opposition or by buying its members across. Ivan lists what remains unresolved — the executive presidency, a German-style mixed electoral system, the constitutional council killed after the 17th Amendment, judicial power used oppressively, customs revenue of which perhaps a quarter reaches the treasury, and education adrift.
භූමිය පමණක් නොව ජනතාවද එක්සේසත් කළ යුතුය
Had the margin been three thousand votes rather than a landslide, Ivan argues, supporters of the two camps would have turned on each other and the country would have run with blood. He traces how every Elections Commissioner has worked under duress: Jayasekera resigned after the 1981 Jaffna district council poll was taken over by the Defence Secretary, Chandananda de Silva could not publish his referendum report for five years, and in 2001 Chandrika Kumaratunga tried to arrest the Commissioner on Sarath Nanda Silva’s advice. The raid on Fonseka’s hotel after the result dulled the victory’s lustre. Ivan closes with eleven questions any constitutional reform must answer — on ethnic identity, rule of law, limits on presidential power, corruption, money in elections, party democracy and access to justice — and warns against repeating 1972 and 1977, when a governing party wrote a constitution alone.
අලුතෙන් හිතන්නට කාලය පැමිණ තිබේ
Sri Lanka is close to winning one of the two decisive questions before it. Where every previous approach had failed and the country was stuck with no end in sight, Rajapaksa made a reckless attempt, staking his own survival and the country’s on fighting the LTTE to a military defeat, and went on down that road against opposition at home and abroad. The world thought he would destroy the country and himself; instead he reached the post he aimed at. The world is changed by those who swim upstream, and until they arrive they are taken for madmen rather than heroes. Military defeat will not settle the ethnic question by itself, but it creates conditions in which it can be settled — and doing so is the shared responsibility of everyone, with the opposition’s duty being to help rather than obstruct. The second question, replacing a disordered political system, needs the same cooperation.
අඳුරු වලා මැද රිදී රේඛා
Ivan argues the coming military victory will change the picture of the country. The decision to fight the LTTE to a military defeat broke with every previous government’s policy, taken against a recognised ceasefire, an established belief that only negotiation could work, and the near-universal opposition of the donor group — and Rajapaksa’s resolve in holding to it under sustained pressure was, he writes, unequalled. He will enter history as the first leader in the modern world to prove a terrorist movement can be defeated by war, and if he also answers Tamil grievances, as one who did both. The gains will follow: aid for the north and east, tourism, paramilitaries disarmed, the army turned to building roads, high security zones released to their owners. Credit belongs to the service chiefs, above all the army commander, and to a Defence Secretary who could obtain whatever he asked because he was the President’s brother.
යුද්ධයේ අවසානය අත ළඟය, ඊළඟට කුමක්ද?
The war is near its end. The LTTE will have to abandon the civilians it holds and flee to the jungle within days, and nothing remains to it but surrender or destruction, whether or not Prabhakaran is still in the country. Defeating what Ivan calls the strongest and most terrible separatist terrorist movement in the world should earn the forces the respect of Sri Lankans and the world — and he names those to whom it belongs: army commander Sarath Fonseka, the navy and air force commanders, the Defence Secretary who coordinated it, and the President. This was a merciless war against the LTTE but not a war against Tamils, though it caused them temporary suffering and produced excesses, as the campaign against the JVP in the south did. No war can be fought with human rights wholly intact. With every Tamil leader killed by the LTTE, that people is now left without leaders of its own, and must be cared for until they have some.
The tsunami can become a political tsunami
A month on from the tsunami, Victor Ivan warns that mishandling the recovery could produce a political tsunami destructive to the government and the opposition alike. He attacks the 100-metre coastal buffer imposed by TAFREN: damage reached 400 metres inland at Telwatta and in Galle town while some houses at the water’s edge stood untouched, so the rule bears no relation to where the danger actually lay. It also bites only on the unlucky — those whose houses survive may stay, those whose houses were destroyed may not rebuild — and leaves the displaced waiting in camps for a house in a location of the government’s choosing, or buying land themselves. Pacific nations facing the same hazard do not clear their coasts, relying on warning systems and tsunami-resistant construction instead. Ivan argues that resettlement without consent breaches both UN policy on the displaced and the constitutional protection of private property, and sets out an alternative: let landowners rebuild where they lived, give them the per-capita sum the government would have spent, extend credit to ruined businesses, and revive economic life quickly.
Overcoming the disaster
Victor Ivan treats the December 2004 tsunami as a test the Sri Lankan state failed. Warning instruments existed and went unused; the armed forces were instructed too late to be effective outside the north-east where they were already concentrated. Forty-eight hours after the waves the government allocated Rs 100 million in urgent relief — a hundred rupees a head for a million destitute — and eight days later the President’s office put reconstruction at Rs 100 billion against the Central Bank’s provisional Rs 400 billion, a sum equal to a full year of government spending or three years of Tokyo consortium aid. In twenty minutes the country lost lives and property comparable to twenty years of war. Ivan argues the two catastrophes cannot be addressed separately, since housing tsunami victims alone would affront those displaced by the fighting, and calls for a two-year all-party government charged with physical reconstruction and with enacting a new constitution — something he thinks civil society will have to compel the parties to accept.