Sri Lankan monks vow to resist deal with Tamils
colombo — Sri Lanka’s hardline monks on Monday broadened a growing campaign by the Buddhist clergy against the government, threatening street protests if the island’s Tamil minority is granted greater autonomy.
Radical monk Maagalkande Sudaththa said hardline Buddhists were mobilising Sri Lankans from the majority Sinhalese ethnic group to resist a new power-sharing arrangement being drafted by the government.
“Monks are going from district to district to educate their followers about the dangers of the proposed constitution,” Sudaththa told reporters in Colombo.
Last week the government vowed to enshrine in law a promised power-sharing agreement in Sri Lanka’s Tamil-majority northern and eastern regions in exchange for a lasting peace.
President Maithripala Sirisena has stated he wants to prevent a repeat of the bloody separatist war that claimed 100,000 lives on the tiny island between 1972 and 2009.
The 225-member national parliament is currently drafting the legislation, but hardliners have vowed to take to the streets before the measures take effect.
“About 70 per cent of MP’s are asleep in parliament when important issues are discussed,” Sudaththa said, accusing many of them of being “uneducated.”
Sudaththa is an ardent supporter of firebrand monk Galagodaatte Gnanasara, who is on bail after being accused of hate speech and stoking violence against Sri Lanka’s tiny Muslim population, the second largest minority after Tamils. —