“It is a kairos [the right time to act] for all religious leaders in Sri Lanka. If they do not act now to bring sanity to warmongering leaders of the country, they are certainly not worth their religious calling,” said the Christian council’s Commission for Justice and Peace in a January 6 statement.
The reaction follows jubilant Sinhala groups setting fire to the Colombo headquarters of a television network called Sirasa/MTV, a private channel owned by a Tamil, at 2 a.m. on January 6. The commission noted the attack on the network that telecasts in the Sinhala language “is certainly a harbinger of things to come.”
“Almost all the Sinhala people in the South are jubilant over the capture of Kilinochchi,” said the council. President Mahinda Rajapaksa has described the victory of the Sri Lanka forces as the “second freedom struggle” of the Indian Ocean island that was a British colony in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The rebels known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have been waging a quarter-century-long campaign for autonomy of ethnic Tamil minority areas in the northern and eastern parts of the island, alleging discrimination at the hands of Sri Lanka’s Sinhala-speaking Buddhist majority.
After Rajapaksa won a presidential election in 2005 with the support of Sinhala nationalist groups, Sri Lankan forces launched a military campaign against the Tamil rebels. After flushing out the rebels from their strongholds in the east, Sri Lankan soldiers had advanced on Vanni in the north where the LTTE controlled a region with Kilinochchi as its capital and that has more than a quarter of a million Tamil residents.
Following recent intense battles that left hundreds dead, government forces took control of Kilinochchi on January 2 after rebels retreated to the Mullaitive area that still remains under their control. The NCC commission said the plight of ethnic Tamil civilians at Dharmapuram following the fall of Kilinochchi had been “horrendous” with government forces “raining bombs” on the area.
“There is total censorship and nobody to speak up for the civilian rights,” Santha Fernando, executive secretary of the church commission, told Ecumenical News International.
In the absence of any international monitors, Fernando said the capture of Kilinochchi has made the minority Tamil civilians caught up in the bloody war “more vulnerable than ever before.”
