Sri Lanka government gains support of Buddhist monks

Sri Lanka government gains support of Buddhist monks

By Somini Sengupta Published: February 23, 2007

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COLOMBO: With full-scale war blossoming once more in a country beset by a quarter century of 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 deeply 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 9 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 mostly Hindu Tamil minority. The monks harbor a resentment of foreign powers, and they oppose any talk of a federal system to appease Tamil demands for autonomy, which they fear would dilute the notion of Sri Lanka as a unitary state.

"In Sri Lanka, we have faced foreign invasions," said the Venerable Athuraliye Rathana, the monk who leads the party in Parliament. "We have been not just preaching. We have been fighting." Indeed, in the last six months, the government, with the monks' support, has been pressing a military campaign against the Tamil rebels, scoring a string of victories along the contested and strategic eastern coast.

Today, a 2002 cease-fire signed by both sides hardly bears mentioning, as the country has descended into a near- daily ritual of mine attacks, air raids, suicide bombings and mysterious abductions. According to the United Nations, more than 200,000 civilians have fled their homes in the last eight months alone, raising the total number of internally displaced people to nearly half a million.

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At least 1,300 civilians were killed in 2006, according to Nordic peacekeepers, the bloodiest year since the truce was signed. For now, the fighting shows no sign of abating.

In the coming months, the national security spokesman, Keheliya Rambukwella, said the government would take on the remaining eastern jungle redoubts of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, as the rebels are known, potentially isolating them in the north and strengthening the government's hand in any future talks.

He rejected the term "military strikes." "We liberate the Tamils from the clutches of the LTTE," is how he put it.

The government says it would welcome peace talks, though the Tamil Tigers have expressed no desire to return to the bargaining table.

"Our intention is not to conclude this through military means, but through negotiations," the foreign secretary, Palitha Kohona, said in an interview here. "At the same time," he was quick to add, "we will take every measure to counter terrorism in this country."

The drive for the east has won favor with the monks' party, whose support was crucial in electing Mahinda Rajapakse as president in November 2005. They have since commended him for a firm hand and for standing up to international pressure to end the offensive.

"If several more LTTE camps are destroyed, the LTTE will be confined to their camps in the jungle like Pol Pot," Rathana said, referring to the former leader of the Khmer Rouge. "Without military action this cannot be defeated." His cellphone trilled. He retrieved the call and returned to the business of war and peace. He called the Tamil Tigers "terrorists" and said he had grown disenchanted with negotiations, but now, as a government representative, he was not ruling it out.

Asked about the involvement of Buddhist clerics in affairs of the state, he swiftly fired back with a query of his own. "Is politics polluted?" he asked. "Was Mao Zedong polluted? Was Mahatma Gandhi polluted?"

Most monks in the country remain apart from politics, but there is nothing in Buddhist doctrine that prohibits or frowns upon activism in earthly matters. "There is a lot of flexibility and gray area," said Asanga Tilakaratne, a professor of Buddhist philosophy at Kelaniya University in Colombo.

Such outspokenness among the monks is in fact not new, but nirvana is not the first thing their political activism, past or present, brings to mind.

The monks have been important in Sri Lankan politics for hundreds of years; the monks are said to have stood by ancient Buddhist kings in battle.

Buddhism is believed to have come to Sri Lanka around 300 B.C., via north India. Buddhist rule was challenged first by a Tamil Hindu kingdom that established itself in the north of the island in the 14th century, then by the Portuguese, Dutch and British until independence in 1948

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