By Rohana R. Wasala 

Continued from Tuesday, April 07, 2026

The Island daily the next day (Monday, December 11, 2017) carried KD’s reply to another writer, Bodhi Dhanapala from Canada, who had made a reference to him in an earlier article to the same paper. I was sure then that Bodhi Dhanapala would respond to him appropriately in due course. As I anticipated, BD’s response appeared in The Island of December 16, 2017. It was an excellent reply to KD, in my opinion. But first let me recall what KD said in reply to Dhanapala in The Island of December 11

 KD summarized what he called his ‘views’ in the form of five points (a-e). He had earlier promised to deal with ‘extremism in general’ in his Sunday column of December 10 (which we were looking at in Part I of this article). Actually, we were looking at the article that KD had thus promised. (It was obvious to me then that, by some quirk, there had been a delay in publishing KD’s reply letter in The Island.) These five points are implicit in KD’s Sunday Island article. Among the five points are two that are particularly relevant to us here. One of them was (b), which said (in KD’s words): I have opposed LTTE terrorism as much as I opposed the state sponsored terrorism of the Sri Lankan military. The latter in fact helped to breed the former. Without the carnage of 1983 the LTTE would have remained no more than a marginal force among Tamils”. 

It appeared that the UNP  government of the day (in 1983) was initially hesitant, for reasons only known to them, in containing the mob violence that erupted following the common funeral in Colombo of some unarmed soldiers murdered in cold blood in Jaffna by LTTE terrorists; the military was not responsible for the deadly results of governmental indecision.  The1983 riots were not due to the alleged barbarism of the Sinhalese either. Although I was not in Sri Lanka at the time, authentic accounts I heard from the BBC World Service radio and from friends back home suggested that the violence was committed by criminal gangs, perhaps under some political encouragement. Ordinary Sinhalese, as usual in such situations, did everything they could to offer shelter and vital help to the victims. Innocent ordinary Sinhalese in Tamil majority areas were subjected to retaliatory attacks, but these were not widely reported.

There were complex realities that prompted the violence committed on innocent Tamil civilians by criminal elements taking the opportunity to loot. The government’s failure to maintain law and order on that occasion led some to hypothesize that it was actually an orchestrated event engineered by a third party. Weaponized communal disruption, occasionally witnessed even today, has a long history. 

Mindless mob violence excepted, legitimate countermeasures taken with appropriate intensity by the security forces against armed terrorism as ordered by the government, were certainly not to be categorised as state terrorism. KD’s statement here gave the readers the wrong impression that the Sri Lankan military acted on its own without direction from the country’s political leadership in its operations against LTTE terrorism in its infancy. The public security personnel  had always taken orders from the government; they had always acted intra vires. At the same time, it was common knowledge then that LTTE terrorism was nurtured from outside; it was not  something sponsored by the Sri Lankan military.

The second point from KD’s list that I considered relevant to us here was (e), again in KD’s words: I comment on barbarism of all forms. Currently these include Burma -Buddhist instigated genocide, ISIS, the Saudi led blockade of Yemen, bombing in Syria and Hindutva mobs. In the past it included LTTE terrorism”. All civilized people would share KD’s sentiments regarding barbarism. But we who knew who were the real barbarians and who were not could not agree with KD when he identified Burmese Buddhists as barbaric terrorists who had initiated violence against the so-called Rohingyas. In most of KD’s newspaper articles that I had read, he demonstrated his deep prejudice against the majority Sinhalese Buddhist community. He extended this to Burmese Buddhists as well. The truth about what was actually happening in Myanmar was cleverly hidden from the world by the Western media. It was a predominantly Buddhist (88%) country where Muslims accounted for only 4% of the population. Traditional Muslims live in peace with their Buddhist neighbours, without being subjected to any discrimination. 

The Rohingyas are Muslim migrants from Bangladesh who are settled in the Rakhine region of Myanmar. Western media falsely depict them as the most persecuted minority in the world”. Though they are described as having lived in that region for centuries, the truth is otherwise. It was during the British occupation of Burma (1885-1948) that Muslim migrants arrived there. These Muslims, supported by money flowing from Islamic fundamentalist groups from the rich Gulf states, have lately begun to agitate for their own sovereign Islamic state in the Rakhine (Arakan) region. It is they who started killing innocent Buddhists and Buddhist monks in that region, burning their places of worship, and houses. Little about such ethnic cleansing activities by religious extremists against the native Buddhist population is reported in the mainstream media due to the influence of money. These media have already demonized all those innocent Buddhists and monks who merely react to fundamentalist violence. 

Among these monks, Ashin Wirathu Thera, who leads a completely justified anti-Islamic fundamentalist movement. A 2013 issue of the TIME magazine carried a front page photo of Wirathu Thera with the caption “Face of Buddhist terror”. His only fault was articulating the plight of innocent Myanmar Buddhists who were being persecuted by a minority of murderous religious lunatics who were determined to Islamize this predominantly Buddhist nation. But media coverage is only for purported violence by Buddhists against Muslim immigrants. Money from the rich sponsors of Islamic terror in West Asia buys the latter false victimhood in the media. The poor wronged Buddhist majority are unheard and unseen. Wirathu Thera says: “No money, no media”.

In December 2024, the Sri Lankan Navy rescued 102 Rohingya refugees (25 children among them) packed in a dilapidated boat  adrift in the Indian Ocean off the eastern coast. They were allegedly fleeing persecution in Myanmar. Following proper legal procedures the authorities moved them to an airforce base in Mullaitivu. Some Buddhist monks showed their concern about taking in these alleged asylum seekers because of their trouble-hit place of origin.

It appeared that the government of State Counsellor (Prime Minister) Aung San Sun Kyi (who was in office from 2016 to 2021) had decided to use the military to contain Islamic extremist violence and to respond to retaliatory acts of violence from their victims, as well. This earned the wrath of the so-called international community, who did not seem to care about the unprovoked victimization of Buddhists in Myanmar and elsewhere including Bangladesh. 

I remember reading courageous Bangladeshi feminist writer and former medical doctor Taslima Nasreen’s 1993 novel ‘Lajja’ (Shame) which describes in graphic detail atrocities committed against Hindus and Buddhists in that country by extremist elements from the Muslim majority.  She was accused of making a ‘blasphemous’ proposal for a revision of the Quran (but according to her, she only called for the abolition of sharia, which amounted to the same thing in their reckoning), and was threatened with death. Since 1994 she had been living in exile. The article titled Will the Pope raise the plight of Buddhists and Hindus? Crisis in Chittagong in Hill tracts” by Savako Utsumi and Lee Jay Walker reproduced on Lankaweb on December 15, 2017 strongly suggested the duplicity that KD attributed to his Holy Father” (who was none other than Pope Francis).

 In his article, KD wrote:

(Aside: Pope Francis could have safeguarded his moral stature if he had not gone to Burma at all, nor spoken in soft, muted and muddled tones. Holy Father, didn’t you know that these people call themselves Rohingya?)”.

We know why the Pope spoke ‘in soft, muted and muddled tones’, as it appeared to KD. The Pope had a moral conscience unlike his deracinated little minded anti-Hindu  anti-Buddhist disciple. The Pope’s eyes were at least half open to the unenviable lot of the innocent non-Muslims (native majority Myanmar Buddhists). It was obvious that for political reasons,the Holy Father would/could not come out with the truth, which was harmful to the dominant global agendas. KD had no such moral qualms.

To be concluded