පැවැත්ම සමග කරන සූදුවක්
Ivan argues that the JVP is gambling its political survival by opposing Ranil Wickremesinghe’s peace effort as it once opposed the Indo-Lanka Accord. He recalls that the party called provincial councils a division of the country, killed people over them and then became their keen participants without apology, and now stays silent on the executive presidency and the President’s stalling of the 17th Amendment. Nationalism, he says, can wreck a settlement but no longer carries anyone to power.
Who was responsible for the Mawanella disaster?
There is a saying that if you go to sleep with dogs you wake up with ticks, and the government is in that position now. What happened at Mawanella, and who let it happen, is followed here from the local politics up to the immunity of the President.
Donor reaction can compound matters
Winning the parliamentary election somehow was a condition of political survival for the PA, and above all for the President and the presidential system. National and international pressure for a clean election was greater than ever before, and the methods used were autocratic and violent anyway.
රට ඇත්තේ විනාශයක එළිපත්තේ ය
Ivan says Prabhakaran’s offensive on Jaffna has evaporated the government’s plans to extend Parliament or win an election through constitutional change. A defeat in Jaffna could topple the government; any election would exclude the North. He notes MPs’ retrospective pay rise, doubts the new Sinhala nationalist party can offer a practical answer, and warns that the war could move south and force the whole country into bunkers.
ද්රවිඩ ජනයා – ලංකාවේ වමට අභියෝගයක්!
Writing in 1979, Victor Ivan challenges Sri Lanka’s Marxists — reformist and radical alike — over their deliberate silence on the Tamil national struggle in the north. They mount poster campaigns and solidarity rallies for oppressed nations abroad, he observes, yet stand mute before a struggle on their own doorstep. He tests their consistency against Bangladesh: the Awami League was no Marxist movement, but the Left correctly backed its independence struggle, measuring the case by whether the people were oppressed rather than by the class character of their leadership. Why, he asks, does that yardstick stop at Jaffna? Rejecting the equation of oppressor and oppressed nationalism — one cannot equate the Black Panthers with the Klan — Ivan argues that the Left’s opportunist alliance with Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism is what makes it unable to support a just demand, and that only by joining the struggle rather than lecturing it from outside can Marxists rebuild the broken Sinhala-Tamil unity.