අනුන් ගැන මිස තමන් ගැන විවේචනයක් නැති ජනමාධ්ය හා ජනමාධ්ය බෝම්බ
Uvindu answered Ivan’s article without answering the basic question it raised about reporting, and Ivan writes again because the subject matters to journalists and to readers interested in understanding Sri Lankan political reality. Six sections follow, ending on the power the press holds and on what he calls media atom bombs.
හෘදය සාක්ෂියේ වික්ෂෝභය (3)
What Ivan sets out to analyse here is the moral crisis facing a society that has to live crushed between the two naked powers of an armed struggle for state power, when both sides stand level with each other — and specifically how that worked on the Sinhala society of the south during the JVP’s second insurrection.
ඝාතන සංස්කෘතියේ අත්තිවාරම්
The article opens by correcting two printing errors in the first part, published in the previous issue: Che, not ‘me’, was killed after being taken into custody, and the number of LTTE cadres in detention should have read more than ten thousand rather than more than a thousand. What follows is an anatomy of how a culture of killing was built.
යුද්ධයෙන් ජයගෙන ප්රචාරණ යුද්ධයෙන් පරාජය වීම
The government won its war against Prabhakaran in an astonishing way. What it failed to do was to understand in advance that after that victory it would have to fight a more complicated propaganda war against the diaspora friendly to him, and that failing in that war could cost it everything the fighting had won.
චැනල් හතර
The documentary Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, shown on Channel 4 on the 14th, has shaken not only foreigners who watched it but the Sri Lankan diaspora of both communities. Letting this question fester is very bad: it does enormous damage to Sri Lanka’s standing and puts Sri Lankans living in Western countries in a difficult position.
අන්තර්ජාතික අවුල ලිහාගැනීම
The government had a programme with a strong vision for defeating Prabhakaran’s separatist terrorism at home. It had no such vision for the international questions that would follow the victory: it failed to see them coming, and even once they had become serious it did not manage to build a programme with a strong forward vision for meeting them.
බින් ලාඩන් හා ප්රභාකරන් පරාජය කිරීම
America has at last managed to end the life of Bin Laden, the terrorist who held the whole of America in dread. Ivan sets that beside the two Sri Lankan cases — Wijeweera’s second insurrection and the defeat of Prabhakaran — and asks what a war against terrorism is, and where the difference lies.
ඇමරිකාව හා ශ්රී ලංකාව
Bin Laden was a terrorist leader who had become a great threat to America, and America had the right to destroy him — we can be glad of it too. But America paid an enormous price for a partial victory: it overthrew the governments of two countries, and hundreds of thousands had to be killed to put down the unrest that followed.
අභියෝගය ජයගැනීම
Whatever the wrongs and shortcomings within the counter-campaigns launched to defeat the terrorist war Prabhakaran led and the terrorist war Wijeweera led, had those campaigns failed and those two movements won, what could have followed was a great destruction. In that sense, Ivan writes, whatever their faults, those campaigns protected the country’s existence.
මූන්ට හෝ මූන්ගේ කමිටුවට හෝ බැණවැදීම අර්බුදයට විසඳුමක් වන්නේ නැත
If Sri Lanka fails to overcome the confusion the report of the Secretary-General’s advisory committee has created, and will go on creating, then all the great hopes the victory in the war gave the country will collapse. The government should make meeting this crisis with self-confidence the first and largest item on its political agenda.