සිදුවූ විපත දෙස ආපසු හැරි බලමු
The tsunami that killed some 25,000 Sri Lankans was a natural disaster, but the editorial asks whether the geologists responsible failed in their duty and why the government managed the aftermath so poorly, noting that rescuers reached the wrecked train with over a thousand passengers only after 30 hours.
ඛේදවාචකය හා රාජ්යය
The tsunami took some 25,000 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands. Ivan sees a silver lining in the way it let people look past their divisions, but argues that it struck a state already collapsing into farce, and finds the Rs 100 million set aside for emergency relief smaller than the budget for restoring tanks.
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.
කිරි හා සීනිවලින් ස්වයංපෝෂිතවීමේ සිහිනය
The President has promised self-sufficiency in milk powder and sugar within five years. Ivan asks whether the country has the capacity, comparing Sri Lanka with India, which won independence through a movement that united all its groups and could build a national economy afterwards.
රට මංමුළා වූ ගමනක
Like the floating rupee, the country has been left to drift. The government lacks a majority and agrees on nothing fundamental, and its talk of self-sufficiency recalls the United Front government of 1970–77. The editorial warns of a slide into full crisis.
Government in a Stalemate
Victor Ivan traces the trap the UPFA government has built for itself. Resuming peace talks would solve both its problems at once — the TNA would support it at least from outside, curing the parliamentary shortfall, and the international aid package would ease the economic squeeze. But the JVP promised the country it would block the interim proposals and shut out Norway, and Ivan concedes their refusal is consistent even if wrong. The SLFP, having called the peace programme a treacherous plan to hand the LTTE a separate state, cannot now embrace it either; nor can the President drop the JVP for the UNP, which holds more seats than her own party and could bring down any government it supported from outside. Even the constitutional change for which she dissolved parliament has lost its constituency. Unable to move, the government buys public opinion with concessions the economy cannot fund, driving inflation and interest rates up on Treasury Bill issues and the rupee down. Ivan closes on Norway’s Vidar Helgesen, who likened the war to a frozen iceberg now melting as the talks collapse.
Voluntary March Towards Destruction
Victor Ivan argues that neither the UPFA nor the UNP read the 2004 election result correctly: the government took a near-tie as a mandate, the opposition as a victory, when both should have read it as a demand for consensus. Parliament has sat three times since the election, spending those days on abuse and fisticuffs while costing Rs 1.9 million a day whether it meets or not. The government advertises the repeal of the Tax Amnesty Act and the compensation formula though no amending bills have been tabled, and diverts youth brigade funds without the parliamentary approval such a transfer requires. Having roused the trade unions against its predecessor, it now cannot drive back the demon it summoned; having roused the country against the Norwegian-brokered talks, it now wants negotiations in an environment of its own poisoning. Ivan holds not only politicians but intellectuals, the private sector and society at large responsible for standing aside, and expects wisdom to arrive only after the fall.
The UPFA Government’s Future
Two months after the 2004 general election the UPFA still lacks 113 seats, and Victor Ivan sets out why it may never reach them. Thondaman’s CWC is gone, the TNA route is closed by the JVP’s line on the LTTE, and the crossover rule strips defecting MPs of their seats — except the JHU’s bhikkhu MPs, who contested without a party constitution and so cannot be disciplined, though poaching them would provoke the JHU into fury. Until the government proves its majority it can do nothing else, including the new constitution the President dissolved parliament to obtain, and only fourteen months remain before the presidential election. Ivan then turns to the economy, arguing the UNF lost because ordinary people saw no dividend from peace while the business community did, and warning that the end of the garment quota system in December threatens an industry supplying 60% of export income and up to 150,000 jobs at home and in the Middle East. The JVP, he concludes, has shown a clean lifestyle but not yet the maturity its mandate demands, and its fate may prove more tragic than the traditional left’s.
What Can Happen?
Reading the April 2004 election result, Victor Ivan opens with a fable of three fish: the green fish stripped of its dominance by a blue-and-red alliance, and the victors fused into one distorted creature, the red fish triumphant but immobilised by the half of the blue fish it cannot finish swallowing. Beneath the allegory he argues that a real change has begun — the system in which either main party’s turn in office amounted to an official permit to plunder public property may not survive the JVP’s new strength. But he judges the JVP’s positions on the economy and the ethnic question neither progressive nor practical: it accepts decentralisation while rejecting devolution, when only maximum devolution can settle the war, and its coercive route to constitutional change invites Prabhakaran to conclude that a minority may also impose its way. With the SLFP reduced to a dwarf and both leaders’ ambitions evaporating, Ivan proposes an all-party interim administration on an agreed reform programme.
What is going to happen?
Writing days before the April 2004 parliamentary election, Victor Ivan argues that no result can reduce the country’s instability. Two nationalist blocs have each split — the Jathika Hela Urumaya’s monks drawing away from the JVP’s claim to represent Sinhala nationalism, and Karuna’s break dividing the Tamil National Alliance between north and east. If no party reaches 105 seats, the balancing seats cannot come from the TNA, since courting Prabhakaran means fighting Karuna and courting Karuna means fighting Prabhakaran. Ivan sets out the manoeuvres open to Chandrika Kumaratunga and Ranil Wickremesinghe in each scenario, warns that a prolonged failure to form a government would weaken the economy and the rule of law and choke off international aid, and notes that Prabhakaran — who had watched the earlier crisis with amusement — is now as bogged down as the two leaders he was observing.