Sri Lanka: Buddhist Mobs Attack Churches

August 18, 2006

Buddhist Monks Brawl at Sri Lanka Peace Protest

by Amantha Perera

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - When saffron-clad Buddhists monks and Catholic priests and nuns in white are joined by Muslim and Hindu leaders in an interfaith rally for peace, the last thing anyone would expect is that their pacific efforts would end in fisticuffs. Chanting "no war, no war" the marchers, on Thursday, wended their way to a public park in the capital where their speeches were rudely interrupted by a group of fiery pro-war Buddhist monks. The peace campaigners were told to take their banners and rally to the east of the island where fighting has been raging between Tamil separatist militants and the armed forces, for over a fortnight. The unseemly scenes that followed, in which pro- and antiwar monks pushed and punched each other were, to many onlookers, of a piece with the mindlessness that has marked more than two decades of ethnic conflict that has pitted the majority Buddhist Sinhala community against the minority Tamils. After the loss of 65,000 lives during that period, and with no end in sight to the conflict, most ordinary citizens seem to have resigned themselves to daily brutalities and rights violations.

Sri Lankan Government Finds Support From Buddhist Monks With full-scale war under way once more in a country plagued by a quarter-century of nasty ethnic conflict, an ever more assertive government has found a sturdy ally in what might seem an unexpected source: hard-line Buddhist monks.

The monks have long been active in Sri Lanka’s polarized politics, but for the first time they have joined the governing coalition with their own political party. Called the Jathika Hela Urumaya, or National Heritage Party, they now hold nine seats in Sri Lanka’s 225-member Parliament.

The party sits at the extreme end of ethnic Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism here, as the government battles a separatist rebellion among its Tamil minority, which is mostly Hindu and Christian. The Buddhist monks deeply resent foreign powers and oppose any talk of a federal system to appease Tamil demands, which they fear would dilute the notion of Sri Lanka as a united nation.

“In Sri Lanka we have faced foreign invasions,” said the Venerable Athuraliye Rathana, the voluble monk who leads the party in Parliament. “We have been not just preaching. We have been fighting.”

In recent months the government, with the monks’ support, has been pressing a military campaign against Tamil rebels, scoring a string of victories, particularly on the contested and strategic eastern coast. The rebels are fighting for an independent Tamil homeland in the north and east.

Sri Lanka's Buddhist monks are intent on war

The hard-line monks are at the vanguard of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, which views Tamils as outsiders. In January, they joined the government with their own party, the Jathika Hela Urumaya or National Heritage Party - pushing its narrow, one-seat majority up to nine.

"The nationalists have huge influence on the president," said Jehan Perera, the executive director of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka, a group working for reconciliation. This was evident, he said, in the expulsion earlier this month of 350 Tamils from the capital Colombo, a move human rights groups described as a "pogrom".

The monks have used their new power to argue vociferously against any self-determination for the Tamils in the north, opposing even the more limited measure of autonomy that most observers believe is necessary for peace. Instead they are pushing for the bloody military campaign against the Tigers to be stepped up.

The heavy cost of the war is evident throughout this tear-shaped island, where 70,000 have died since 1983. In the past 18 months, 5,000 have been killed - compared with 200 in the previous three years - shattering a 2002 ceasefire brokered by Norway.

Asked for his views on the need for further peace talks, Mr Rathana said: "We need conversation - and we need war." The Tamil desire for a homeland is based on a myth, he added. "Sri Lanka was totally a Sinhalese kingdom, and most people accept that."

Buddhist monks protest Miliband visit to Sri Lanka

COLOMBO: Buddhist monks led a demonstration outside the British High Commission in Colombo Wednesday to protest against the visit of foreign minister David Miliband, witnesses said.

Monk legislators from the ruling coalition accused Miliband, who arrived in Colombo earlier Wednesday with his French counterpart Bernard Kouchner, of supporting "terrorism."

The two ministers are in Sri Lanka to press demands for a ceasefire in the government's war against Tamil Tiger rebels. They also want greater humanitarian access to the island's war zone where some 50,000 civilians have been trapped by the fighting.

"Miliband is not a representative of the civilised world, he is a representative of terrorists," a monk shouted as police kept a close watch on the hundreds of demonstrators.

Buddhist mobs have attacked several churches in Sri Lanka, threatening to kill a pastor and ransacking a 150-year-old Methodist church building in the capital. Four Buddhist extremists approached the home of pastor Pradeep Kumara, calling for him to come out and threatening to kill him. The pastor said his wife, at home alone with their two children, phoned him immediately but by the time he returned the men had left. Half an hour later, Kumar said, the leader of the group phoned him and again threatened to kill him if he did not leave the village by the following morning.

Later that night the group leader returned to the house and ordered the pastor to come out. “My children were frightened,” Kumara said. “I tried to reason with him to go away, but he continued to bang on the door and threaten us.” Earlier, another group of men broke into the 150-year-old Methodist Church in Colombo.Witnesses said they saw them load goods into a white van parked outside the church early the next morning. They removed everything, including valuable musical instruments, a computer, Bibles, hymn books and all the church records

Sirimavo (also Sirima) Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike was born on April 17, 1916, to an aristocratic Kandyan family and was educated in a Roman Catholic convent in Colombo. Married to Solomon West Ridge-way Dias (SWRD) Bandaranaike in 1940 when he was a minister in the government of Ceylon, then a British crown colony, Bandaranaike's life was politically uneventful. She had the preoccupations of a housewife married to an eminent national leader who became the prime minister of Ceylon in 1956, eight years after its independence. In 1959, however, SWRD Bandaranaike was assassinated by a Buddhist monk, and such was SWRD's charisma that his party, the Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP), chose Sirimavo Bandaranaike to be its leader 

Form of Buddhism that preaches violence and hatred against Tamils

Muslim extremists use Quran as their source of hatred and the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka have a holy book called Mahavamsa, a book with controversial writings, full of hatred towards the Tamils. Sri Lankan governments backed by the Sinhala Buddhist extremists have been killing Tamils for more than 60 years because the Buddhists in Sri Lanka delight in eliminating Tamils.

Sinhalese believe that they doing something great by following the hatred teachings and stories from their holy book. This book is very specific to Sri Lanka and not used by Buddhists in other countries. Buddhism in Sri Lanka is not the peaceful one that is preached by Dalai Lama in Tibet. One of the former prime ministers of Sri Lanka was assassinated by a Buddhist monk.