Monks Become New Line of Offense Against Rebels

As the Sri Lankan army reels before an onslaught of rebel fighters, the people urging it to fight harder are the men in the saffron robes.

Sri Lanka’s Buddhist clergy, long an influential force in national politics, are stepping forward to rally the nation in its darkest hour. The string of defeats suffered by the army at the hands of separatist rebels, which has stunned and demoralized this island nation, has also drawn the monks out of their temples to try to hold the country together.

In speeches and sermons, some monks are urging the government to spurn negotiations with the Tamil Tiger guerrillas and crush them with military force. Others warn that the Buddhist religion and the “Sinhala race” are under siege from barbaric hordes. Influential members of the Buddhist hierarchy are helping form a political party to push their hard-line views in parliamentary elections this summer. And recently, a group of senior monks called on India to intervene militarily in Sri Lanka.

The Buddhists’ tough talk and overt political engagement are at odds with their image as a pacifist brotherhood. As the militant monks who make up much of Sri Lanka’s Buddhist clergy see it, they are obliged to defend not just their faith but their nation too.

“Our country is on the verge of being handed over to the terrorists,” said Hadigalle Wihelasaqa, a young monk attending a political rally Sunday in this seaside town on Sri Lanka’s western coast. “Buddhism teaches kindness, but you don’t have to allow yourself to be destroyed.”

Wihelasaqa was one of several priests attending the meeting of Sinhala Heritage, a political party formed last month with the blessing of influential Buddhist monks. Party leaders say they are disgusted with the civilian leaders who have brought Sri Lanka to the brink of military defeat, and they are urging a tougher line against the rebels.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, who launched their struggle for an independent state in 1983, have routed government troops in a series of recent battles and now stand on the verge of expelling the army from the northern city of Jaffna. The Tigers fight on behalf of the Tamil people, a largely Hindu minority, against the majority Buddhist Sinhalese. More than 60,000 people have died in the war.

On Sunday, prospects for the government forces brightened slightly. The defense line just outside Jaffna stabilized. Sri Lankan jets bombed rebel positions, and the government poured supplies and fresh troops into Jaffna.

“They are trying to breach the defenses,” air force spokesman Ajith Vijayasundara said. “But in the last two days, they have not made any gains compared with previous days.”

The monks and their lay brethren blame Sri Lanka’s politicians--not its generals--for the latest run of defeats. They say that Sri Lanka’s main political parties have already given up too much to the Tamil minority and that it’s their corruption and venality that have brought the country to its current bloody impasse. They say that Sinhalese politicians have stood by as Tamil rebels have razed dozens of Buddhist temples and persecuted the Sinhalese people.

The monks appear to be awakening long-dormant feelings of national pride--and of insecurity about the future of their religion.

At Kalutara Town Hall, about 200 Sri Lankans endured an afternoon of tropical swelter to listen to prominent countrymen decry the failures of their government. On the stage sat half a dozen businessmen and professionals, and to the left a row of Buddhist monks in long robes, their heads shaved. The civilians spoke the most, but it was the monks who seized the attention of the crowd.

“For thousands of years, whenever there has been a threat to our race and our motherland, someone has come forward,” monk Thebuwane Piyanandathera said from the lectern. “There are 40 political parties in this country, and none of them are protecting the Sinhalese people.”

The crowd whooped and clapped. Then, beneath the quiet beat of the ceiling fans, a choir of girls dressed in white sang a hymn to the Sri Lankan nation:

We are born into the land of precious stones

A land made fertile by the blood of our ancestors

The sons and daughters of the land.

The organizers of Sinhala Heritage are hoping to field candidates for Parliament in the August elections. It seems a modest goal, but the fact that Sunday’s meeting occurred at all was remarkable enough: After the recent calamities on the battlefield, President Chandrika Kumaratunga banned all public meetings. The police ordered Sinhala Heritage’s leaders to cancel Sunday’s meeting, but the priests had blessed it, and officers stood by silently as the crowd came together.

“The monks have always guided this country--in ancient times they guided the kings,” said R. Malalanayake, a civil servant who attended the gathering. “Whenever the country is in danger, they have always taken the lead.”

According to legend, Sri Lankan Buddhism was born in the 5th century B.C., when Buddha himself told a group of followers to carry the faith to the island off India’s southern coast. Buddha prophesied that the religion would thrive in Sri Lanka for 5,000 years. And as Buddhism died in India, it flourished in Sri Lanka, which spread the religion across Southeast Asia. The Sinhalese, the legend goes, became Buddha’s chosen people.

Since Sri Lanka attained independence from Britain in 1948, Buddhism and Sinhalese nationalism have often gotten mixed together. Many in the Buddhist clergy have supported the more virulent strains of Sinhalese nationalism: Monks supported the imposition of Sinhalese as the national language and the changing of the country’s name from Ceylon to Sri Lanka, which is Sinhalese. In 1959, a Buddhist monk assassinated then-Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike, who was the current president’s father.

Sri Lanka’s Tamils and many of its Sinhalese believe that it was such manifestations of pro-Sinhalese and Buddhist feeling that helped spawn the Tamil Tigers and the independence movement.

Still, the country’s declining fortunes on the battlefield have led many Buddhist monks and Sinhalese nationalists to believe that their religion and way of life are threatened. They blame the Tigers for destroying nearly 300 Buddhist temples in areas under their control and for the slayings of dozens of prominent monks. In one spectacular incident in 1987, Tiger guerrillas boarded a bus and executed 27 Buddhist monks.

“This is a war against terrorists,” said Piyanandathera, the monk. “Negotiations will not work. The organization must be destroyed.”

The monks and their supporters find ample support in Buddhism’s teachings to justify their militancy. On Saturday, Kamal Deshapriya, a leader in a newly formed group called the National Movement Against Terrorism, cited the tale of a stork that ate all the fish in a pond.

“Finally, the crabs killed the stork because he had taken all the fish,” Deshapriya said, sitting under a tree outside the Ispathanaramaya temple in the capital, Colombo. “In Buddhist teachings, it is acceptable to wage war against a minority that is threatening you.”

Many of Sri Lanka’s monks--and many more of its Buddhists--do not support the aggressive stand against the Tamils. And as Sri Lanka’s quagmire has fostered greater militancy, it also has given rise to a peace movement. Until political demonstrations were banned, thousands of Sri Lankans were joining in public “meditations for peace” to protest the war. That, the peace advocates say, is more reflective of the true teachings of Buddha.

“More and more people are turning to nonviolence,” said A. T. Ariyaratne, the leader of the peace meditations. “Even if you win this war, you will lose, because violence never triumphs.”

But sitting outside Kalutara Town Hall after his speech, Piyanandathera said he did not think nonviolence can work in Sri Lanka’s civil war and that it didn’t work when Buddha was alive either.

“In the time of Buddha, the kings had armies,” Piyanandathera said. “And Buddha never told them to disband.”