Showing posts with label ethnic tamil minority. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ethnic tamil minority. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Parts Unknown: Buddhist Sri Lanka (video)

SLD; Suicidal Host Anthony Bourdain, Parts Unknown; Bhante, A. Wells, Wisdom Quarterly

Sri Lanka Day, Los Angeles, arrives in Pasadena every year midsummer: July 14, 2018.
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Thursday, January 15, 2015

Pope and Buddhist "fundamentalists" (audio)

Bhante, Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, Pat Macpherson, Crystal Quintero, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Mitch Jeserich (KPFA FM, Berkeley); BBC.com; The World (pri.org); NPR (npr.org)
Theravada monks with Pope Francis as he visits Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka (jcourt.net).

Pope on sticks and stones: What did you call my mother? Bam! (Steviet7867.deviantart.com)
 
Pope Francis shows [his violent] side:
You'd better not insult my mother [or I will punch your face]
Matthew Bell (PRI's The World, Jan. 14-15, 2015)
Pope Francis sits next to Hindu leader Ndu-Kurukkal Siva Sri T. Mahadeva during the Interreligious Encounter in Colombo, Sri Lanka on Jan. 13, 2015 (Stefano Rellandini/Reuters).
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Pope Francis made an adept, subtle move to win over a nation alienated by a legendary predecessor -- and then showed off his straight-talking side Thursday, telling reporters on a plane he would punch out someone who insulted his mother.



He said "Yo mama," and I punched him.
The issue came up in a talk from the pope to reporters en route from Sri Lanka to the Philippines. "No one,'' the pope said, referring to last week's assault on the satiric [French] magazine Charlie Weekly, ''can kill in the name of God. This is an aberration [unless it’s one of our Crusades then it’s just business as usual over at the Vatican where we kill and torture in the name of our God and have for 1,000 years].”
 
The pontiff added there were limits to freedom of expression, however. “One cannot react violently, but if (someone) says something bad about my mother, he can expect [me to react violently with] a punch. It’s to be expected,” Francis said.

Not a "good" Catholic but Catholic: Hitler
[So let's see if we have this straight. This Catholic pope, there being non-Catholic popes believe it or not, will violently slam you in the face for calling his mother "fat"? How about calling his God something? How about satire, how does he feel about that? Catholicism and Catholic Church leaders have always had an affinity for censorship and fascism, as when the Vatican befriended and encouraged Nazi Adolf Hitler and dictator Benito Mussolini, both themselves nominal Catholics.]

Buddhist monks welcome Pope Francis (JC)
“There are a lot of people who speak badly about other religions. They make fun of them. What happens is what happens with my friend (who insults my mother). There is a limit.”
 
The long exchange followed a successful trip to Sri Lanka, in which he made a key symbolic addition on Wednesday: a quick visit to a Buddhist temple in the capital, Colombo. The pontiff removed his shoes and listened respectfully while monks chanted and prayed, and his hosts treated him to a rare view of some relics of descendants of the Buddha.
 
The brief temple stopover speaks to the success of Francis' two-day trip to Sri Lanka. The last papal visit to the South Asian island nation was 20 years ago, and Pope John Paul II was boycotted by Buddhist leaders on that occasion. More
 
Pope Francis releases dove while he visited a shrine in Madhu. He said there must be "reparation" for the "evil" Sri Lanka has suffered during its 26-year-long civil war (AFP/BBC).
Buddhist "elder" (thera), Pope Francis (center), Hindu swami bow heads as the Argentinian pontiff met leaders from many religious groups on Tuesday in Sri Lanka (Reuters/BBC).
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Soft dictator "King" Rajapaksa's coup failed.
Pope Francis I is in Buddhist Sri Lanka, an island off the southern tip of India that is 70% Theravada Buddhist and a stronghold of early Indian Buddhist tradition.

He is there to rally 7% of the population, which is Christian, and to promote or at least give lip service to "reconciliation" among the formerly warring Buddhist Sinhalese (70%) and Hindu Tamils formerly struggling to split the island in two to have their own homeland (Tamil Eelam) in the north, just across the strait from the state of Tamil Nadu, India.

But a larger issue has arisen on the island during what was once Asia's longest running civil war: the ridiculous rise of "fundamentalist" Buddhist monastics and their lay supporters who resent the island long established Muslim minority.

The nearby Maldives were once Buddhist strongholds but were converted, it is said, when a Muslim merchant boat with Muslim saints was shipwrecked there. Muslims have long lived alongside Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Catholics, secularists, tourists, and the tiny and diminishing indigenous population of original aboriginal animists.
 
Are popes idiotic, hypocritical, or what?
Bravo, bravo to some acts of violence. And let's make the ETs Catholic! (thewire.com)
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Catholic view: St. Michael (freerepublic.com)
Isn't it amazing how many times the great pontiffs put their foot in their mouths?
 
The Nazi Pope, the traitorous and hated retired Pope Benedict, was bad enough writing in his memoirs how he and his brother were members of the Hitler Youth, which much embarrassed the corporation's officials within the Vatican who then went on to lie in trying to deny it. But there it is in writing and widely published.

Now we get this great pope, but he goes around fondling and washing young boys' feet and calling it an act of "humility," holds and kisses baby boys in creepy ways, says "Who am I to judge?" when it comes to his fellow gay bishops and child molesting priests in the Catholic Church, denies nuns advancement and females a better place in the church, then says he wants to baptize space aliens when they arrive.

(He did not say if they arrive because he surely knows they are already here and have been for a long time, and the Church will eventually make the announcement because no one believes governments -- like England and Canada -- that disclose their official secret UFO files).

Pope in Asia: This is how I'd punch him if he called my mother a name (BBC video).

 If this pope is not an idiot, which he probably is NOT, is he a hypocrite? Case in point: He goes to Buddhist Sri Lanka, with its own Buddhist "fundamentalist" hypocrites, to preach "truth and reconciliation" to the Buddhists and Hindus after a long civil war and to canonize the island's first "saint" -- then he ends up criticizing the Charlie Hebdo attackers AND in the same breath stating he would punch someone in the face for calling his mother a name.

On other occasions he, or his PR firm, say he has been misquoted or his words mistranslated. What will they say for him this time? [Today on The BBC Newshour (Jan. 15, 2015 podcast) and The World the rationalizing/PR damage control began by saying something to the effect of those Latins, unlike we Anglo-Saxons, have a frisky way of speaking, not literal like us.]

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Q: Patty, Sandy, is this pope an example of how Catholics really are (like that Catholic website that quotes Jesus as saying he didn't come to Earth to do anything but wage war, allegedly a biblical passage), or is he an idiot, or a hypocrite? A: That's hard to say. He's much better than the previous pope, but he's no John Paul II, who almost singlehandedly dismantled the Church and its central tenets while being beloved by the whole world like the 14th Dalai Lama.  

Q: So not an idiot and not a great Catholic...a hypocrite then? A: Possibly. But a goodhearted one! Q: And why are so many of the right wing maniacs at FOX News Roman Catholic? A: Maybe they're trying to prove their mettle to FOX's largely white Evangelical Christian fundamentalist-leaning viewers. Q: Yeah, then, why not be fundamentalists?

A: That's hard to say for sure, but even if Puritans burned witches in Salem, they still didn't do half of what Catholics have done and still do in the name of religion -- wars, misogyny, torture, Crusades, Inquisitions, helping Hitler, anti-Semitism, fascism, corporate theocracy, hypocrisy, continuing the countless crimes of the "Holy" Roman Empire. Joining FOX News just seems like a nature offshoot of that behavior. Ask Garrison Keillor (see below). Sure there's angry Bill O'Reilly to be embarrassed about, but what about FOX's rabid Roman Catholic Judge Jeanine Pirro? All those Sunday masses and all that plastic surgery just to spew such venom? Fear mongering about a "reverse-Crusade" coming back to bite us:

FOX News' Roman Catholic Pirro: "We need to kill them. We need to KILL them...You're in danger, I'm in danger. We're at war...Our job is to arm those Muslims to the teeth" (FOX).
  
Entrance to Buddha Dambulla Cave, Sri Lanka (Richard Silver/rjsnyc/flickr.com)
Sri Lanka was once an idyllic place, enchanted and full of serendipity, but was ruined by war.
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The disastrous "Buddha Power Army"
Sri Lankan novelist Nayomi Munaweera helps expose fundamentalists (nytimes.com).
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Stupa decorating (sundaytimes.lk)
AUDIO: Nayomi Munaweera, author of Island of a Thousand Mirrors, on the embarrassing "Buddhist fundamentalists," war crimes of the ousted political family, and strange recent Sri Lankan elections, where the winner seems to have come out of nowhere. The new leader was inserted into the process in November and is now in office with a mandate, after an alleged 80% of the island's electorate turned out to vote -- the typical pattern of a selection rather than election.

Who meddled in Sri Lanka's democracy? The usual suspects used to be India and the UK but now it looks like it may have been the USA. Letters and Politics (Jan. 13, 2015, 10:00 am download this clip (MP3, 10.27 MB) or PLAY clip on computer's media player. Also on this episode, "The Battle for Radio" with Victor Prickard, author of America’s Battle for Media Democracy. 
Why does Sri Lanka have Catholics?
Newly minted "St. Vaz" of Sri Lanka holds disfigured crucifix of Catholic God (AP).
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Get me Vaz, I need Vaz before I visit.
(WQ) The Island of Lanka (Ceylon, Serendib) has long been attractive to merchants and European imperialists such as the Portuguese, Dutch, and British, who set up a fort at Galle and a large stronghold in Goa, India. Joseph Vaz was born in Goa and came to Sri Lanka to spread Catholicism.
  • Born in Portuguese colony of Goa in 1651, arrived in Sri Lanka in 1687
  • Jailed multiple times by Dutch authorities for helping Catholics, dressed as a beggar to hide himself
  • Produced prayer books in Sinhalese and Tamil
  • By his death in 1711 he had earned himself the title Apostle of Sri Lanka
Pagan glory in Catholic hands.
Who was Sri Lanka's first canonized Catholic saint? One is voted into sainthood in Catholicism, which is not nearly as difficult as it used to be when the Vatican had the Office of the Devil's Advocate, its actual name, to test, verify, and debunk claims of sainthood from proposed candidates. Without anyone formally adopting the contrary position in an adversarial legal system, it is only a matter of popularity, money, and expediency to get canonized. For example, just about anything will count for a "miracle." Vaz died centuries ago, I get told by my doctor that I have diabetes, I pray to Vaz, "OH, cure my diabetes!" On my next check up I'm fine. Miracle! MIRACLE!

We rule Europe and the world like royalty!
He's a saint, a saint, canonize him quick! This testimony by me will be put in Vaz's file as proof of sainthood, no Devil's Advocate will come and question me or possibly even verify my claim at all. But Vaz would not be canonized for that. No, he would be canonized for political reasons when a pope visits a land the Church wishes to advance Catholicism. That's why he gets rushed to the front of the canonization line. And what does Catholicism even think a "saint" is? From what we have been able to gather, if one is in heaven then one is a saint. That's it. That's all. Surely the connotation is wider than that, but the denotation does not seem to amount to any more than that.
  • Sri Lanka statistics: +70% Buddhist, 12% Hindu, 9% Muslim, 7% Christian/Roman Catholic, less than 1% aboriginal.
Say You’re One of Them, Nayomi
Nadifa Mohamed (New York Times, 9-26-14)
In one of the many startling scenes in Island of a Thousand Mirrors, Nayomi Munaweera’s first [fictionalized] novel [based on real life events], a Sri Lankan girl riding the train to school is suddenly surrounded by a machete-wielding [Buddhist] mob, who demand proof she isn’t [a minority Hindu] Tamil.

In her panic, she recites the Buddhist sutras “preaching unattachment, impermanence, the [impersonal nature of life and] death,” an unholy trinity that could apply to all civil wars.

This chilling exchange reminded me of a conversation I once had on a London bus with a Somali refugee, who swerved from banal chitchat into dark reminiscence. He recalled a moment in Mogadishu when he was forced to recite his genealogy, the string of grandfathers’ names that place all Somalis within their clans, and he borrowed a school friend’s lineage, as his own would have marked him for death.

Rajapaksa: I kept the civil war going, like past leaders, to consolidate my powers. Then I ended it decisively with war crimes. Then when you wouldn't vote me into a third term, I planned a coup de tat, which failed because the military wouldn't back my plan.
 
The weight of these humiliations, momentary yet everlasting, is the ballast of a narrative that ebbs and flows in time and space.

From the maternal expanse of the Indian Ocean to the sterile swimming pools of Los Angeles [with its large Sri Lankan Sinhalese Buddhist population], the lives of Munaweera’s characters are defined by bodies of water that reflect the state of their [minds], including the corpse-clogged wells and lagoons of the Tamil north and the playful shores of the Sinhal[ese] south, alive with flying fish and ancient turtles. More

Pope Francis disembarks from the plane upon his arrival at the airport in Manila, Philippines, on Wednesday. In comments to reporters aboard the plane, Francis said though the attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine was an "aberration," free speech "cannot make provocations," especially against people's faith.
Jet set pope does Asia hop from Buddhist to Catholic lands. Seen here arriving in Philippines, the most Catholic place in Asia (Ettore Ferrari/EPA/LANDOV).

Pope Francis backs freedom of speech -- but "within limits"
Krishnadev Calamur (NPR, Jan. 15, 2015)
The pontiff said there are limits to freedom of speech, especially when it concerns religion. He was answering a question about the deadly attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Weekly.

Pope Francis says there are limits to freedom of speech, especially when it comes to someone's religion, in comments aboard the Papal Plane that made reference to the deadly attack last week on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
 
Francis defended freedom of speech, calling it a fundamental human right, but said it must not cause offense.
 
"It is true we cannot react violently," he told reporters today en route to the Philippines. "But if Dr. [Alberto] Gasbarri here, a great friend, were to say something insulting against my mother, a punch awaits him."
 
Gasbarri, the official who organizes papal trips, was standing next to the pope at the time of the comments.
 
"You cannot make provocations," Francis added. "You cannot insult people's faith." More
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Saturday, June 14, 2014

Buddhism arrives in Sri Lanka! (Poson)

Bhante, Dhr. Seven, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; SundayObserver.lk
While the ruler was hunting, Buddhism arrived in Sri Lanka with enlightened brother and sister missionaries, Mahinda and Sanghamitta, scions of India's Buddhist Emperor Asoka (sundayobserver.lk)
 
The full moon (poornima) Buddhist observance day (uposatha) is being celebrated in Pasadena today at the Los Angeles Buddhist Vihara under the brilliant "honey" moon.

Long ago the island of Sri Lanka -- Ceylon and Serendib -- was disputed territory, a Yakkha Kingdom, with frequent incursions by Hindu kings and the Tamil nation just miles away across the straits in India.
 
The Great Epic mentions the exploits of Rama and Sita being spirited away to its pleasant shores. Eventually Buddhist kings arose who settled the island claiming it for their own. More
Vedda people, indigenous jungle aboriginals still hunting in Sri Lanka (lanka-holidays.com)
 
(W) According to the Mahavamsa, the "Great Chronicle," Prince Vijaya encountered the royalty of the Yakkhas. Great King Kalasena and Queen Gonda on the celebration of the marriage of their daughter, Princess Polamitta, in the Yakkha capital of Lankapura, conquered and subjugated them. Lankapura may have been in Arithra or Vijithapura (a fortress-city in ancient Sri Lanka). The Yakkhas thereafter served as loyal subjects with the Vijiyan Dynasty, and the Yakkha chieftain sat at an equal height to the Sri Lankan leaders on festival days. Today Yakkha refers to a vanishing and rarely seen aboriginal people dwelling in the jungle. See History of Sri Lanka
 
An island at war is no place for Dharma
(This history is disputed, and the longest civil war in Asia was fought over it, or in any case used as the pretext for a conflict that profited a few political and military leaders in spite of the fact that it killed so many and impoverished even more islanders. Tamil Hindu separatists were saying, "We've been here all along" or even "We were here first." And the Sinhalese Buddhist majority, many of them nationalists, said: "This is a Buddhist land with no room for separatists!" There would have been no need for a dispute had the majority not so poorly treated the large ethnic minority, pushing it to seek its own self-determined way. We saw the abuse with our own eyes, and while our sympathies lie with the Sinhalese nationalists, the Hindu Tamils have a legitimate gripe, and reparations need to be made for war crimes and atrocities by the state. Strangely, the same tension was playing out more than a thousand miles north in formerly Buddhist Kashmir, where Pakistan-inspired and very cruelly-mistreated Muslim separatists want only independence. India will not hear of it, nor will Pakistan. Both seek to usurp the Muslim-majority territory, like the other Kashmir to the west, and China looks on ready to pounce if either should fail: fertile ground for endless conflict).

The spiritual Plymouth Rock of Sri Lanka, Mahintale, where Buddhism landed, now the main focus of celebrations on the island (sundayobserver.lk).

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Saturday, November 16, 2013

Full Moon Observance/War Crimes

Lunar observance flyer
November 17: The Los Angeles Buddhist Vihara in Pasadena is a Sri Lankan Theravada monastery and temple complex. It observes the traditional lunar observances (uposathas), which include the practice of the Eight Precepts (sila or sill), meditation (bhavana), hearing the Dharma (bhana).
  • Next lunar observance: Sunday, Dec. 11, 2013 - Sill Program (Eight Precept observance and meditation)

Sinhalese war crimes against Tamil minority
Krishnadev Calamur (NPR.org, Nov. 15, 2013)
Rajapaksa (Chris Jackson/PA/Landov)
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa defended his country's human rights record amid a barrage of criticism as the [largely Buddhist] Indian Ocean island-nation hosts the Commonwealth summit [with prominent nations boycotting].
 
"Civilians, women, children, and pregnant women were brutally killed by the terrorists continuously for 30 years, and none are being killed now," Rajapaksa said [as if to justify the war crimes he committed and those of previous administrations]. "That is the peace the country has won."
 
Sri Lanka has only recently emerged from a bloody decades-long civil war [the longest in Asia], which pitted the country's Sinhalese [Buddhist] majority with separatist [Hindu] Tamil rebels in the north and east of the island nation. [Tamils have lived on the island, coming from neighboring Tamil Nadu, India, a few miles away by a strait, Palk Bay, that is sometimes traversable by foot.] 
 
Buddhism traveled through Asia from India
Human rights groups allege that tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were killed [in a genocide that followed decades of prejudicial treatment by the majority Buddhist Sinhalese] in the final push against the few rebels of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
 
The issue has dominated the Commonwealth meeting, which begins in [the Sri Lankan capital of] Colombo this week. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Canada's Stephen Harper are among the leaders who have stayed away [boycotting the meeting to demonstrate against human rights abuses by Pres. Rajapaksa and previous administrations]. India has a significant Tamil population of its own.
 
British Prime Minister David Cameron, who is attending the meeting, says he will ask Rajapaksa "tough questions" on human rights and war crimes charges.

Rajapaksa heads the Commonwealth for the next two years. The group comprises countries that were former British colonies. [Sadly, not all Buddhist monks stayed neutral during the civil war, evincing nationalist sympathies against the direct calls of elder Sangha leader pleading for peace and neutrality.]

Sri Lankan war crimes
North was once a Tamil majority area
Wisdom Quarterly (COMMENTARY)
Wisdom Quarterly is a great fan and supporter of Sri Lanka, a beautiful Buddhist island nation and former colony of the British and Portuguese. But one need not be blind to love it. We will not defend, conceal, minimize, or collude with ANY country's government engaging in systematic institutional racism, war crimes, genocide, or abuse of its citizens, not even if that country is our own.
 
Our weapon-dealing, conflict-loving USA is much to blame for the civil strife in Sri Lanka, playing the Gandhi Family's India and Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan against Sri Lanka's majority government. There is perhaps no country in the world that is not touched and ruined by our CIA, which has now become a transnational institution unto itself, an ally of the military-industrial complex rather than the vast majority of American citizens. Americans know more about the secret NSA and its illegal activities than we even begin to suspect about the CIA and its push to destabilize governments worldwide to serve the interests of business and multinational corporations.

While we do not agree with the Tamil separatist movement, it is certainly understandable why it happened: decades, perhaps centuries, of abuse by the majority Sinhalese population. The island's civil war was never a religious conflict, but it certainly got painted as such. Nearly all Tamils are traditional Hindus. And there are sizable Muslim (as in the nearby Maldives), Christian (remnants of British rule), and Catholic (remnants of Portuguese) minorities.

Sri Lanka's government repeatedly colluded to lengthen the war rather than rushing to end it at all costs. A previous president was assassinated for playing both sides (Tamil and Sinhala) to advance his own hold on power. A Gandhi was taken out by a disgruntled Tamil on account of the civil war, India never being able to overtly support the Tamil separatists, though perhaps aiding them covertly. CIA and British involvement is implicated, with America working its own strategy of supporting and pressuring all sides and all countries involved. The US trained Sri Lankan government and police services, so their draconian use of force was not completely unexpected. 

Indian atrocities
The same outrages occur in Kashmir between India and Pakistan and China. It is impossible to fully side with India against Pakistan because of its unconscionable abuse of Kashmiri Muslims. Indian militants -- sent to occupy the Himalayas by the Indian government to maintain its Line of Control (border) with Pakistan, China/Tibet, and Afghanistan -- disappears, imprisons, tortures, recruits, beats, and murders Kashmiris on a regular basis. This behavior against its Muslim-majority neighbor (Pakistan), created by the exiting colonial British with their successful "divide and conquer" strategy, is not limited to a sworn enemy. It is visited upon tiny landlocked Nepal, which is utterly dependent on India economically and politically. 

Nepal is mainly Buddhist, as all Himalayan nations (former kingdoms) traditionally were. But it is now the world's only "Hindu nation." This is brought about by Indian influence and census manipulation. Nepalese cry out every time we point out that the Buddha came from India. The Buddha was not born in India. He came, according to Dr. Ranajit Pal, from what is now Afghanistan and what was then the northwest frontier of greater India (Bharat) in the region of ancient Gandhara. There was no organized or united "India" at that time, only loosely affiliated maha janapadas (great clan territories).
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Saturday, June 23, 2012

UK Buddhist chief convicted of sex abuse

Chief Sanghanayaka Thera of Great Britain Sentenced to 7 Years in Prison for Child Abuse
Colombo Telegraph (June 5, 2012) via The Buddhist Channel; Wisdom Quarterly
Sri Lankan chief monk convicted of sex abuse
LONDON, England - The Chief Monastic Order Elder of Great Britain and abbot of the Thames Buddhist Vihara has been convicted of four counts of indecent assault on a underage and sentenced to seven years in prison, a judge ruled [June 5, 2012].
   
He is also banned for working with children for life and his name is added to sex offenders register, a court spokesman told The Colombo Telegraph.
   
Venerable Pahalagama Somaratana, 65, of Dulverton Road, Croydon was convicted at Isleworth Crown Court on May 1 of four counts of indecent assault on a female under 16 between January 1, 1977 and December 31, 1978 at an address in Chiswick.
   
He was found not guilty of the rape of a female under 16 between January 1,1977 and December 31, 1978 at an address in Chiswick and not guilty of indecent assault on a female under 14 between January 1, 1985 and December 31, 1986 at an address in Croydon.
  • [This is even more serious because it is absolutely a breach of monastic disciplinary rules, which means that if penetration happened -- whether or not he was convicted of it or even charged -- he has committed a grave "defeat" offense (parajika) and is instantly not a monk and not part of the Order. In addition, he has discredited the Buddha's message (Dharma), Theravada Buddhism, the Male Monastic Order (Bhikkhu Sangha), Sri Lanka (his country of origin), and celibate Buddhist monasticism.]
  • Sri Lankan Buddhist monk beat 14-year-old Catholic student for refusing to learn Buddhism
In May 2010 Child Abuse Investigation Command officers began an investigation into historical allegations of indecent assault and rape. On Tuesday, 14 September 2010 a (then) 64-year-old monk was arrested on suspicion of an historical indecent assault and rape. He was questioned at Heathrow police station and later bailed pending further enquiries.
 
He was charged on September 12, 2011 and further charged on  November 11, 2011.
  
On Friday, September 23 Pahalagama Somaratana appeared on bail at Feltham Magistrates’ Court charged with rape of female under 16 between January 1, 1977 and December 31, 1978 at an address in Chiswick and indecent assault on a female under 16 between January 1, 1977 and December 31, 1978 at an address in Chiswick.
   
Pahalagama Somaratana has been charged with another eight counts of sexual abuse on Friday, November 11 the London Metropolitan police told the Colombo Telegraph. According to the metropolitan police these eight indecent assaults on a female under 14 took place between January 1, 1985 and December 31, 1986 at an address in Croydon.
   
The 65-year-old Pahalagama Somaratana Thero appeared on bail at Feltham Magistrates’ Court on Friday, December 2 and was bailed to appear at Isleworth Crown Court on December 20, 2011. Source

Sri Lankan war and sex crimes against Tamils
Raped ethnic minority Tamil Hindu rebel
GRAPHIC CONTENT! A new video shows the Tamil rebel [LTTE] media TV announcer Issapriya’s naked body (shown left). It lies with hundreds of dead bodies, first with hands tied then untied. They indicate that she had been raped by Sri Lankan soldiers then executed.
  
A [majority Sinhalese Theravada Buddhist] security forces officer speaking in Sinhalese to a female says, “Here,  here, Voice of Tiger announcer.” (See at Minute 2:56 in the video).
The video clearly demonstrates a woeful and consistent pattern by the Sri Lankan forces: Most of the female combatants, armed and unarmed, as well as civilians are stripped naked or have their underwear pulled down to their knees and their bras are either missing or near their neck, exposing the breasts of teenage girls and young women. Only a few men are stripped naked. [Do Sri Lankan soldiers rape them, too?]
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