The 35 year war by the LTTE and its precursors on this country started in 1973 when 20,000 detonators were smuggled into Jaffna to start 20,000 explosions is now coming to an end. Daily in the media and on TV, we see on-the-spot video reports of the LTTE on the run. As this brutal outfit can be only compared with the devastation caused by the Portuguese and the marauders of Magha, we must take stock of their attack on Buddhism.
The foreign news media almost always label this war as between Sinhalese Buddhists and Tamil Hindus. This could not be further from the truth. The leadership of the LTTE and Tamil separatist feelings have been nurtured by the Christians who lost their 500 year old privileges after we got Independence. The Hindus have played only relatively a marginal role in the separatist ideology. The Christian roots of Tamil separatism include the 19th century Jaffna School of Christian literature which inspired separatism in Tamil Nadu. The Tamil State Party (cleverly camouflaged in English as the Federal Party) and later the TULF had a Christian leadership in the form of Chelvanayagam from Malaysia. The racist founder of the international Tamil Studies Conference, Father Thani Nayagam again from Malaysia modelled his campaigns on the Christian Literature Society. Earlier Fr. Thani Nayagam undertook as his first major effort the spread of Tamil Christian Literature. But Thani Nayagam living in Malaysia had accepted its Bhoomi Putra policies which quite unlike the situation in Sri Lanka had direct policies of racial discrimination.
The recent Catholic villain was Father Joseph of the Madhu Shrine who when the government had rescued the shrine from the LTTE, smuggled it deeper into LTTE territory. And when the Sri Lankan President, whose wife is a Catholic, wanted to visit the shrine, he said that permission has to be first got from Prabahakaran. Incidentally there is evidence that Madhu Shrine itself was built on the ashes of one of those hundreds of Buddhist temples which the Portuguese set fire to.
Earlier we had the spectacle of that Jaffna Father Emmanuel, a Catholic, telling The Independent, a British newspaper: “First, I was born a Tamil, then I became a Christian. I can’t forget that heritage…. Even the Tigers’ suicide-killings are theologically acceptable”. Elsewhere in another British publication, New Internationalist, this same Christian saint Emmanuel said that he is “committed to the cause of Tamil independence from Sri Lanka.” Father Emmanuel is heir to a great Christian tradition that has brought destruction and genocide to this country and elsewhere. Most recently, there has been evidence that the then Pope was encouraging with his silence, the Jewish Holocaust and of the involvement of Catholic priests in the Rwandan genocide. Later during the infamous CFA, Catholic priests were photographed blessing the LTTE separatist map for their future state in the Pongu Tiger separatist celebrations.
As the peaceful people in Sri Lanka now regain the whole Island, we must ensure that never ever should the machinations of the Catholics to reintroduce the reign of terror in the form of the LTTE be allowed.