Sri Lanka Buddhist leader warned of ‘end’ to all Muslims
Sri Lankan Buddhist leader Galagoda Atthe Gnanasara threatened to destroy Muslim businesses and asked his audience to fight against the minorities. Part of the audience shouted back saying yes, they will do it.
The defeat of terrorism and the advent of peace and stability have brought about significant benefits not only for the people of Sri Lanka but for the whole South Asian region, and it is only right and proper that the magnitude of these benefits should receive recognition, Professor G.L. Peiris, Minister of External Affairs, said in Colombo today. He was delivering the keynote address at a symposium on establishing a Centre of Excellence on Ocean Sciences and Environment for the Indian Ocean Rim countries.
He did not speak about the false promises made by the President Rajapaksha to the world leaders that he will implement a political package to minority if he is allowed to kill the LTTE in May 2009. More than 40,000 Tamil civilians were kiled in month of May 2009 by the Sri Lankan forces and more than 1000 LTTE Leaders and their family members who surrendered with white flag after UN negotiated the surrender were killed and Tamil girls were raped and killed by the Sri Lankan forces.
The Minister also referred to Sri Lanka’s role of increasing significance in recent times, in ensuring the security of sea lanes by helping to control people smuggling and a wide range of connected illegal activity involving drugs and narcotics, money laundering and the proliferation of small arms. The use of technology in the prevention of natural disasters has also received proper attention, he added.
He did not talk about the poor Human right activities by the government forces on the minority or did not say why they were refusing the UN officials to hold a independent inquiry in to the war crimes by the Sri Lankan forces on the Minority.
The Minister cited the success of the Joint Working Group between Sri Lanka and Australia as an outstanding achievement. He was greatly heartened by the strong endorsement which Sri Lanka’s proposal in this regard received in international fora in recent months, including the meeting of IORA in Perth, Western Australia, in November last year and at the symposium on the Blue Economy in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, earlier this year.
But last June the Australian Government has issued a travel advisory to it’s citizens in the wake of the recent unrest in Sri Lanka. Australia have asked its citizens to ‘exercise a high degree of caution’ when travelling in Sri Lanka.
AS journalists around the world reel over lengthy prison sentences handed down to three Al Jazeera reporters in Egypt, a media freedom controversy has erupted in Sri Lanka after the editor of the Government run paper Daily News called for the arrest of a local Al Jazeera journalist for reporting on inter-religious riots. In a series of Twitter rants, the state-owned newspaper’s editor, Rajpal Abeynayake, accused Al Jazeera’s Colombo stringer, Dinouk Colombage, of inciting religious tensions by reporting on Buddhist-Muslim clashes last week in southwest Aluthgama in which four people died and about 80 more were injured.
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