දෙමළ සමාජය ගැන
Three and a half hours with a delegation from the Tamil diaspora — all of them long-standing opponents of the LTTE — gives Ivan an account of the north he could not get otherwise: the local elections, the caste composition of Jaffna now that most Vellala families live abroad, and the widespread refusal to believe Prabhakaran is dead.
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.
What Next?
Written after the LTTE’s defeat in May 2009, the piece credits Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sarath Fonseka and Gotabhaya Rajapaksa with the victory and turns to what remains: uniting a people divided by race, religion and caste, and settling the ethnic question. Ivan blames the Tamil leaders who first proposed a separate state as much as Prabhakaran, and argues that 1956 could have been handled differently.
ඇත්ත ඇති සැටියෙන් දැකීම
Ivan answers two replies to his article on the genocide claim, apologises for having left a
professor unnamed, and turns to what international law actually says: who counts as a
combatant, what carpet bombing forbids, which three rights survive an emergency, and what
the International Criminal Court could and could not be asked to do. He closes on a
comparison few make — the caste composition of those killed by Wijeweera’s followers and by
Prabhakaran’s, and of those killed by the forces suppressing both.
දෙමළ ප්රශ්නය ජයගැනීම
The price of defeating the LTTE is not yet countable, Ivan writes, but the harder question
is what follows: how to heal a community that has paid an enormous forfeit and now carries a
defeated mind. The Tamils hold an old language and an old civilisation, and cannot be
governed by force against their will; the road out begins when Sinhalese hearts set down the
victor’s pride.
දෙමළ කැරැල්ලක් ආවේ ඇයි? සිංහලයින් ද ආපසු හැරී බැලිය යුතුය
Having asked where the Tamil struggle went wrong, Ivan turns the question on his own
community. He puts the direct cost of the war to 1998 alone at 423 billion rupees and traces
the language question from the cross-party agreement of the early fifties — broken when Sir
John Kotelawala promised parity in Jaffna and the backlash swept both major parties into
Sinhala Only — through Bandaranaike’s twenty-four-hour pledge, the fast of F.R. Jayasuriya,
the unimplemented Tamil Language Act and standardisation.
දුම්රිය ගමන හා වේගය
A commuter’s letter about the two and a half hours from Galle to Colombo sends Ivan through
the history of travelling speed, from the ox cart at eight miles an hour to trains that now
exceed three hundred. Sri Lanka had the best railway in colonial Asia and has since
shortened rather than extended it; nine hundred level crossings on a thousand kilometres of
track are what hold the trains back. He recalls Lalith Athulathmudali’s expressway joining
Hambantota to Jaffna, and finds the same instinct in the Yal Devi announcement.
යාල්දේවී නැවත ඇරඹීම
Ivan reads the decision to restore the Yal Devi line to the north as symbolic as much as
economic, and proposes that the sleepers be paid for village by village — each temple,
church, school and workshop buying one marked with its name — so that the south has a hand
in rebuilding the north. What the north needs now, he writes, alongside development and
elections, is kindness.
පෞද්ගලික වෛද්ය විද්යාල ප්රශ්නය ගැන වැඩිදුරටත්
Replying to a Peradeniya medical student who objected to his earlier column, Ivan asks why
selling medical services is acceptable if selling medical education is not, and sets World
Health Organization figures for doctors, nurses and pharmacists per ten thousand people
against those of Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Korea and Europe. Two per cent of Sri Lankan
children who start school reach a degree, against forty in Korea; the state holds a monopoly
on universities it cannot fund, and twenty-two billion rupees a year leaves the country with
the students it turns away.
යුද්ධයෙන් ඔබ්බට
Alongside ending the war and answering Tamil grievances, Ivan argues, the country must
attend to the global downturn reaching it: strengthen reserves, cut the imports it can do
without, encourage bicycles, and teach English to the tradesmen and nurses already trained
but shut out of the Western labour market for want of it. Agriculture, he writes, is the
country’s protection in this crisis.