Buddhists attack mosques, call for ban on
halal foods as tensions escalate
Published: 11 January, 3:46
PM
COLOMBO - With a bloody civil war over and
a cautious peace at hand, a group of hardline Buddhist monks is
rallying Sri Lankans against what they say is a pernicious threat:
Muslims.
In just over a year, the saffron-swathed
monks of Bodu Bala Sena - or Buddhist Power Force - have amassed a
huge following, drawing thousands of fist-pumping followers who
rail against the country’s Muslim minority.
Buddhists have attacked dozens of mosques
and called for boycotts on Muslim-owned businesses and bans on
headscarves and halal foods. At boisterous rallies, monks claim
Muslims are out to recruit children, marry Buddhist women and
divide the country.
“This is a Buddhist nation, so why are they
trying to call it a multicultural society?” said Mr Galagoda Atte
Gnanasara, the 37-year-old pulpit-pounding monk who co-founded the
group in 2012. “Not everyone can live under the umbrella of a
Buddhist culture.”
There have been few if any physical attacks
on people, unlike in Myanmar, where Buddhist monks helped incite
communal violence in 2012 and last year and even stood watch as
Buddhist mobs slaughtered Rohingya Muslims. But many Sri Lankans
and human rights workers are alarmed, saying the monks are creating
communal divisions and giving Buddhism a bad
name.
Nearly all of the dozen critics of Bodu
Bala Sena interviewed for this story declined to speak on the
record, fearing reprisals.
The Sri Lankan government only rarely steps
in to defend or protect Muslims, who make up roughly 10 per cent of
the 20 million people on this Indian Ocean
island.
Many see the silence as tacit approval, but
Media Minister Keheliya Rambukwella said it is intended to
encourage community members to work out their own problems. He said
the anti-Muslim rumblings are “minor agitations that are normal in
any multicultural society”.
“If things get more serious, we will take
action,” he said. “These kinds of things can ruin a nation, we are
aware of that.”
In September 2011, Buddhists reportedly
smashed a 300-year-old Islamic Sufi shrine to rubble in the ancient
city of Anuradhapura, a UNESCO world heritage site. Police have
denied that the incident happened, but photographs taken by locals
show at least a dozen officers watching as young men hammer the
shrine to pieces while a monk holds a burning green Islamic
flag.
In April 2012, a 2,000-strong Sinhalese mob
including monks ransacked Jumma Mosque in the north-central city of
Dambulla as police looked on. The government later ordered the
removal of the decades-old mosque, saying its location within a
sacred Buddhist area was an affront.
In March last year, police watched as
red-robed monks led a hollering crowd in trashing a Muslim-owned
clothing store.
The United States Embassy spoke out after a
stone-hurling mob attacked a suburban Colombo mosque in August,
calling it “particularly troubling in light of a number of recent
attacks against the Muslim community in Sri
Lanka”.
Muslims say they are also the targets of
ludicrous conspiracy theories, including rumours that they spit
three times in any dish before serving it to a non-Muslim, or that
Muslim shops sell women’s undergarments tainted with chemicals that
cause infertility. AP