By Rohana R. Wasala

An exclusive Sinhala language BREAKINGNEWS episode on a suspicious, so-called ‘truth connect tv’ youtube video (uploaded September 22, 2025) announces that the United Nations Organization recommends the appointment of a Truth Commission to re-establish the Sihela identity”. I remember seeing almost the same video with slightly different lay persons speaking in it, uploaded about a year ago. That’s why it struck me as suspicious. The new uploading has been done to coincide with the current Geneva sessions. The same scene of a long drawn psyop drama aimed at the cultural genocide of the majority community might be re-enacted  next year too, as it has been done over the past four or five years. It is obvious that this special piece of news is meant only for Sinhala speakers (the targeted potential dupes). Here, for the benefit of my readers I wish to translate verbatim the newscaster’s introductory sentence or two, including the one given above within quote marks. He continued:

 At the 60th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council held today (September 22), Kleppe Ariyamagga Himi, the founder of the Ariyakammattana organization and the convenor of ‘Sri Lanka’s indigenous Nikaya the Sihela Sri Sambuddha Maha Nikaya’, made a historic speech”. (Actually, it is a statement that he read out in an almost empty chamber in that place. It is accessible at the link provided with the video. But the ‘speech’, the statement really, is only in English, so designedly beyond the reach of monolingual Sinhala listeners/readers (on whose behalf Ariyamagga, widely suspected to be a Sinhala fluent ethnic Tamil, is pretending to be engaged in his historic mission. The so-called ‘Sri Lanka’s indigenous Nikaya’ is a baseless new invention that challenges the authority of the three established monastic chapters {or the Siyam, and the now combined Ramanna and Amarapura Nikayas} created under royal patronage by monks brought from Thailand and Myanmar respectively in the 18th and 19th centuries. More about bhikkhu imposter Ariyamagga’s ‘historic speech’ below.)    .

The uploaders or their supporters seem to have blocked a Google translation of the thumbnail description of this video given only in Sinhala, which means that interested Tamil or English speakers, if any, are prevented from understanding what it says. So, I made my own rough translation of that sketch summary for the benefit of my readers here:

The world’s oldest indigenous nation known as Sihela composed of the three main tribes Yakkha, Deva, and Na (ga) have been robbed of  their authentic national identity heritage. This has resulted from an act of deliberate cartographical disinformation about the geographical location of the Buddha’s birthplace by falsely marking on the map of northern India the common holy land named Dambadiva or Jambudipa which, until 1836, remained a part of the island  which is known today  as Sri Lanka.”

The Sinhala phrase that I have translated verbatim as ‘the world’s oldest indigenous nation known as Sihela,’ with its comically extravagant false claim, makes fun of the Sinhalese people’s sense of ethnic identity. .  

The video shows three yellow-robed persons including Ariyamagga and a layman accompanying them entering a building. Ariyamagga’s petition is a four page document, a written statement, submitted by a certain ‘African Green Foundation International’, described as ‘a non-governmental organization in special consultative status’. It is specifically stated that the statement is issued (by the UNHRC) ‘as received in the language of submission only’, which is English. The title is:

‘Erasure of Ethnic Identity and Sacred Geography: A Call for a Truth Commission led by the United Nations Human Rights Council’

The petitioners call upon the UNHRC to

‘ 1. Establish an independent Truth Commission to investigate the erasure of Sīhela ethnic identity and the falsification of Dambadiva/Jambudīpa.

 2. Recognise the inter-religious impact of colonial distortions and promote healing through restorative justice and intercultural dialogue.

 3. Urge global solidarity to support a UN resolution rectifying this colonial-era violation.

 4. Restore the Sīhela People’s Indigenous title and rights under UNDRIP’. 

The statement concludes: This is more than a historical grievance—it is an urgent call to reclaim the true ethnic identity of the Sīhela Peoples and to restore the spiritual integrity of all communities affected by colonial falsification. It is a demand for the right to practice religion in its authentic, undistorted form. Rectifying these distortions is essential not only for the survival of the Sīhela Peoples but also for millions of Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, and Muslims across South Asia who lost access to their true sacred heritage”.

It looks like nothing more than the following happened at the UN in connection with Ariyamagga’s historic mission, in addition to his reading out the ‘statement’ to a hardly identifiable audience apart from the four individuals of the bogus Sihela delegation, staged on September 22: 

Written statement submitted by African Green Foundation International, a non-governmental organization in special consultative status* The Secretary-General has received the following written statement which is circulated in accordance with Economic and Social Council resolution 1996/31. * Issued as received, in the language of submission only. [31 July 2025]”

So, the Secretary General has barely acknowledged receipt of the written statement. The UN has made no recommendation in response to the petition as claimed by the newsflash. 

The ‘truth connect tv’ video’s ‘historic newsflash’ about the UN recommending the appointment of a truth commission to ‘re-establish Sihela identity’ is clearly fake news. The newsreader they have employed (for a fee, no doubt) is a professional, whose professional reputation cannot be at stake, since he is catering to a dumb audience. It’s a very familiar voice for me, but I can’t remember the name of the person (a TV news presenter I usually hear from Sri Lanka) that it belongs to. 

I remember having viewed a similar video with a different, but related theme, nearly three years ago involving the same fake monk Ariyamagga. This was a Youtube video (uploaded December 27, 2022) with the alarmist caption බුදුන් ඉපදුණු මේ ලංකාවට සිදු වු අපරාදෙ අපිත් දැන ගනිමුද (Let’s learn about the enormity of the injustice perpetrated on (Sri) Lanka the birthplace of the Buddha) that captured my attention four or five days later (to be precise, on January 1, 2023). It was both because of the sensationalism of the title and its connection with a popular youtuber who presented its content as an important newsflash issued from a so-called ‘We Rectify Our History’ organization (presumably based in the UK). Five days after uploading, the video had got about 8,500 views, and only 301 subscribers. Though the veteran youtuber announced it as a newsflash under ‘Breaking News’, the maker of the video was someone else who chose to obscure their identity.

 While watching the video, though, I felt that the professional newscaster himself made this video in the manner of a strong believer in the controversial new hypothesis that the Buddha was born in Sri Lanka. I thought ‘could a person like the particular YouTuber (I prefer not to reveal his name for the time being) agree to provide his professional expertise for the propagation of an egregious lie that is harmful to the country?’ In terms of my experience, the YouTuber in question was far too rational, educated, cultured and knowledgeable to embrace such a harebrained ideology. I believed that he was too honest to prostitute his journalism for mercenary ends.

Lucidity, idiomaticity, and precision of expression characterize this person’s Sinhala. Such linguistic elegance is not common among ordinary Sinhala language Youtubers. His professionalism and sophistication as a journalist are hard to match. However, the emphatically positive tone of voice that he adopted right through to the end of the presentation could not be due to any real personal commitment to the authenticity of the ‘Buddha was born in Sri Lanka’ concept. Instead, I tried to rationalise to myself, out of my personal regard for that person, that,  by lending his voice to this video, he might have been helping out a struggling new YouTuber, through his own established fame. That’s what I thought at the time. Yet, he seemed to be overdoing his generosity because, his apparent espousal of that extremely anti-national heresy, might only have provided some justification for the insidious process of cultural genocide that was being carried out, unknown to most ordinary Sri Lankans of diverse ethnicities, against the country’s innocent Sinhala Buddhist majority, something that had been already going on for decades even by then. 

According to that ‘Breaking news’ announcement a certain ‘Ariya Kammattahna Sanvidhanaya/Ariya Kammattahna Organization’ led by a so-called Sri Lankan Buddhist monk by the name of Kleppe Ariyamagga (Ariyamagga of the municipality of Klep in Norway) was going to sue the British government. He had taken steps to institute legal action against the government officials who served during British colonial times. He charged that Britain had distorted historical information relating to the subcontinent of  India and that his fundamental rights were being violated by officials serving today in their place by intentionally failing to rectify those distortions. ……. The case names the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the State Secretary for Digital, Culture, Media and Sports, Secretary of State for Tourism Zones and National Heritage, and the Secretary of State for Education as respondents……the court action will go ahead as the violations are continuing……”. (This is from the opening of the spoken text of the video as roughly translated by me from Sinhala as other relevant parts of the same spoken script found in the rest of this essay;  details such as names of ministries may not exactly tally with the real ones. – RRW)

The ‘We Rectify Our History’ organization argues that Britain has violated provisions of various legal statutes that it cites such as Britain’s 1998 Human Rights Act, the 1988 Copyrights, Designs, and Patents Act, and the 1907 Hague Convention. It demands that at least certified photocopies of the ancient ola leaf books stashed away in British libraries and museums be made available (to it on behalf of Sri Lankans) free of charge without reserving copyrights and that steps be taken to provide funds for new archaeological excavations needed to correct those (deliberately introduced) errors in our country’s history. 

The plaintiff organization pleaded (on the earlier occasion in 2022) that (the British government) acknowledge that the school education system established under the colonial administration disseminated false information for public consumption without any foundation in Sri Lankans’ (collective) national and religious identity, and also that (the British government) tender an apology to the general public of the world for the crimes committed.

The truth is quite contrary to what Ariyamagga is asserting on both occasions. In Sri Lanka’s ancient chronicles, Buddhist literature and even in colloquial parlance in Buddhist religious contexts today the name Jambudipa (Pali) or Dambadiva (Sinhala) refers to the subcontinent of India. But according to the ‘Buddha was born in Sri Lanka’ theorists, Jambudeepa was in the northern part of Sri Lanka, and Lankadipa was in the south-east corner of the island, with the ancient capital Anuradhapura located there! But they keep changing the map to suit their shifting responses to criticisms from time to time. 

A central complaint made in the aforementioned (false) pleas for justice is that the true location of the Jambudipa where the founder of Theravada Buddhism, Gotama Samana (as they call him), was born and lived, and the locations of its cities and Buddhist holy sites were conspiratorially concealed from the world and that these venues were substituted by those in India by deliberately  altering the maps of Sri Lanka and India. This is alleged to have misled the Theravada Buddhist adherents and deprived them of their right to know the truth about their spiritual master. By ‘Theravada Buddhists’ the petitioner ‘We Rectify Our History’ organization means Sinhalese Buddhists. What does it aim to achieve for the Sinhalese Buddhists by exiling Buddha Gotama to a remote corner of the small island? The ludicrous complaint of the ‘We Rectify Our History’ organization lets the cat out of the bag.

The ‘Buddha was born in Sri Lanka’ idea is obviously a piece of fiction carefully thought up by some evil minded individual or a group of individuals  to confuse the credulous unsophisticated, grievously ill informed (embarrassingly large) section of the Sinhalese Buddhist community about their religion as well as their history. Those who stand to gain by this may be having a field day at present. They must be laughing their heads off in private at the silliness of those Sinhalese Buddhists who have swallowed this and other similar  fabrications such as the Ravana myth hook, line, and sinker. 

To be continued