Sunday Punch 3
Forget their race, forget their creed and forget that they were born as Muslims in the land of Buddhist Burma, now Myanmar. Just hold them in your hearts for awhile as human beings, as victims of circumstances beyond their control, as innocent sufferers of another’s wrong, a nation’s crime, who must now cry in pain and bleed with grief; and storm heaven and verily raise the question, ‘ why me, why us, what grievous wrong have we and our children done on this earth this birth to deserve this terrible fate?
On April 30th, the Sri Lanka Coast Guard craft patrolling the Indian Ocean waters off Trincomalee found 16 children, 7 women and 7 men huddled aboard a fishing boat. They belonged to a race known as the Rohingyas, a minority tribe successive Myanmar Governments had refused to recognize as an indigenous race, persecuted them without pause, and had now unleashed a systematic campaign of terror which the UN had condemned as ‘ethnic cleansing’.
They were the innocent civilian casualties caught up in a conflict not of their own making: forced to flee their burning villages in fear of their lives and their children’s lives, abandon their homes in fright to face a dark fearful future unknown. And carried with them naught but the only wealth they possessed: their lives and their children. They had endured the terror in their ghettoes of fear, where danger sprung from every government sewer and the swish of the machete slash could be heard cracking the silence of the night, followed by the death wail of a neighbour being hacked to death.
They had braved the perils of the sea, faced the tempests that brew in the Bay of Bengal and dared the gulfs to swallow them purely to flee the Myanmar Government’s military crackdown against their indigenous race; and seek refuge on some safe shore.
Perhaps, they never even intended to come to Sri Lanka and had set their sails to some other shore; but, merciless fates, as they sometimes mockingly do to those in dire straits, may have directed some foul wind to blow their fishing boat to bob adrift off Trinco’s coast when the coast guard naval vessel arrived to their timely rescue.
The Sri Lankan Navy handed these unfortunates to the Mirihana detention camp. The Colombo office of the United Nation Commission for Human Rights (UNCHR) soon intervened and obtained a court order and secured their release. They were then taken and placed in a UNCHR safe house in Mount Lavinia pending repatriation to a third country.
Procedure had been followed to the letter. From the navy taking these 30 refugees from their fishing boat and handing them over to the Mirihana detention centre to the UNCHR intervening and obtaining a court order to secure their release and temporarily sheltering them until a country could be found willing to accept these 16 children and their parents. It has even been reported that one woman refugee had given birth during this period.
Even though they may have experienced every day their ever present trauma, reliving the nightmare of the horrors they had lived through in Myanmar, every time – five times a day – when they fell on their knees and prayed facing west in the direction of Mecca, no doubt, they would have thanked their Almighty Allah for setting the sails of their fishing vessel and steering their boat to stumble upon serendipity’s safe shore, where a gallant navy, a just court, concerned local UNCHR officials and a compassionate people guaranteed them peace of mind; and assured them that their temporary sojourn in this thrice blessed island of Theravada Buddhism would be safe.
But then this Tuesday, the bottom fell off their cherished hopes and revealed that, though 99. 9 percent of the nation’s Buddhists follow or strive to follow the Buddha’s teachings, there’s that one rotten iota that threatens to make the rest turn mold.
On 26th September, even as former president Chandrika and her sister Sunethra Bandaranaike were laying floral wreaths to commemorate the 59th anniversary of their father’s death, the founder of the SLFP and former prime minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike who, blood swathed and in excruciating pain after being fatally shot at his Rosmead Place residence, when asked as to who shot him had the exquisite presence of mind not to refer to his assassin as a Buddhist monk but to say with gasping breath ‘ it was a man in robes’, a few monks – or men in robes, SWRD would have called them - gathered around a house down Templar’s Road in Mount Lavinia.
They belonged to a new grouping of Buddhist monks called the Sinhale Jathika Balamuluwa which had come into existence only last year. Their slogan: Sinha-le. Like a poisonous deadly dapperling mushroom - Lepiota brunneoincarnata – they have sprouted from the sible terms the attack against the Rohingya refugees who were under the care of the UNHRC in Mt. Lavinia by a group of 'thugs in robes'. In fact, I condemn these actions not only as the Minister in charge of Media but also condemn as a Buddhist, a Buddhist who is very proud the fact that Buddhism is a religion of non-violence and compassion,” he said.
He said the group of refugees, 30 of them from Myanmar, were rescued at sea by the Sri Lankan Navy in April this year and they were under the care of the UNHRC waiting to be resettled elsewhere in the US or Canada.
“In fact this is not the first time Sri Lanka has given temporarily shelter to such refugees. Way back in March 2008, the Navy rescued survivors of a boat after they were found adrift in the high seas.
“They were kept here until 2012 the year they were resettled in the US,” he said.
The minister said in a separate incident in 2013, the navy rescued two boat loads of Rohingya survivors from a shipwreck in the Eastern coast of Sri Lanka.
Hats off and thumbs up, Mangala. You have done the nation proud and redeemed it in the eyes of the international community that the home grown mangos in Lanka’s basket are not rotten to the core merely because one or two have turned jaundice.
And thumbs down, Foreign Minister Tilak Marapona for staying mum; and offering no stroke when the lofted ball was ready to be hit for a six. Perhaps, you let it pass in fear it might strike someone beyond the pavilion tent. But if you cannot stand the heat, perhaps, you should not be in the kitchen. compost pile of Lanka’s recent mire. And to make their mark in the morning’s paper and carve a niche of their own in the annals of face books, they displayed to the full the chivalry of Sinhala chauvinism by intimidating 16 children and seven mothers and seven men -Burmese refugees who had fled the homes in terror to meet terror again at the hands of a few monks.
And the head priest himself, no less, was present in person, to grace – or disgrace - the occasion with his saffron robe and to display to what extents men in robes could use the saffron shroud and stoop to blotch and taint, to blacken and tar the sacrosanct respect it invokes in a human heart. If you have heard of lay people looking up and spitting, this was a prime time example of a few monks groveling in dung and smearing in earnest the respect and worship the people accord them – not for the man but for the robe. Shorn of the accumulated respect it had earned though the ages by the venerable monks of old, these rabble rousing ragbag would be stripped in public and exposed; revealed as scarecrows dressed in a turmeric shroud to ward of crows.
And by their actions – how can one claim to be a Buddhist let alone a monk, if one not only fails to practice the sublime truth of Compassion towards the unfortunate but actively encourages others, too, to join one in attacking the discriminated – they effectively and conclusively demonstrated they had not only taken leave of the senses but had taken leave of their right to wear the robe of the truth seeker and were fit only to don the horns of the caricatured devil in cartoons.
Even as a Saville Row bespoke double breasted suit made in the best of British wool does not make one a gentlemen neither does a saffron robe make one a Buddhist monk. As President Sirisena asked in New York this week at New York’s Sri Lankan Buddhist Temple,
“Who is a Buddhist monk? Anyone can go to a shop and buy a robe and an atapirikara, and dressed thus people will worship him as he walks the streets, but does that make him a Buddhist monk? Or is it the qualities that he possesses that make one a monk, worthy of reverence?”
It’s a tragedy of our times that certain monks have chosen to exploit the sacrosanct respect people have for the robe, and have chosen to prostitute it for illicit political gain in the self same manner a tart on twilight street would hitch her mini skirt an inch higher to attract custom.
But a fervent appeal must be made to these misguided monks not to take advantage of their blessings. Not to bring contempt upon the robe which invites the laity’s respect and fills their bowls with alms. If not for the robe, they would end up as nothing more than beggars on the street without a Dhamma to preach for their mid day meal. Do not disparage, do not reduce to ridicule and contempt the noble compassionate philosophy of the Buddha which had so moved the world for over two thousand five hundred years – which had so moved India’s greatest emperor Chandasoka to