Circle of a crisis
Sri Lanka has become a country caught in a vicious circle of crises with no way out, and the special feature of that circle is that each crisis is bigger and more dangerous than the one before it. Five passages of this column were removed by the censor and stand in the printed text as the single word Censored.
Invasion of Jaffna inevitable
The Army Commander says Elephant Pass was given up on strategic grounds. What the LTTE had in fact done was bring the base to a point where the army could not get water or food into it — and a base abandoned for strategic reasons still proves that the means of holding Jaffna are gone.
Self interest in making constitutions
As a nation we are on the edge of a great abyss, and the leaders behave like crabs dancing in water until it boils — so blinded by hunger for power that they cannot see the danger to themselves, let alone the danger to the country.
Hatred: barrier for fruitful talks
Will the Ranil-Chandrika dialogue change the political picture? Will it produce even a consensus on the ethnic crisis that has gone on destroying life? Not, Ivan argues, while the hatred each side has cultivated for the other is the one thing both of them still hold in common.
Is history repeating itself?
When a ruling party acts undemocratically it falls to the official opposition to enlighten its members and the public and turn them into an active force against it. What happens when the opposition cannot or will not is the subject — and the case Ivan works from is the SLFP of the 1980s, read through Mick Moore.
A new age of terror
The government called the harassment of the singers Rukantha Gunatilaka and Chandralekha Perera a robbery, and the levelling of Anoja Weerasinghe’s house at Moneragala a personal grudge. Set those explanations beside each other, Ivan argues, and a pattern appears that the country has seen before.
Who killed Kumar Ponnambalam?
Kumar Ponnambalam was the most courageous of Sri Lanka’s political commentators. He lived in Colombo among Sinhala people, most of his associates were Sinhala, and knowing exactly what it cost to defend the LTTE from Colombo he went on saying what he thought, fearlessly and well.
This is what happened
There are occasions when a foolish friend can be more dangerous than a vicious enemy. The longest piece in the archive: Ivan’s point-by-point answer to the account the President gave of him in a televised interview, setting out what actually passed between them from the founding of Ravaya onwards.
Her Vasana chakra spinning other way
President Kumaratunga is drifting towards a political abyss from which there will be no easy return. She did not come to power through commitment, experience or ability but through good fortune, and she became president at a moment when she had been hoping only to become an MP.
Failure to see the wood for the trees
If Prabhakaran can reverse in seventy-two hours what forty thousand men gained in thirty-three months, and if society still cannot see after that experience that there is no military solution to the ethnic problem, then the day a separate state is established in the North-East cannot be far away.