Colombo (AsiaNews)
- The Bodubalasena, an organization
of Buddhist monks, is calling on the government of Sri Lanka to ban vasectomies and tubectomies "to increase the Buddhist population." According
to the association in fact, the national laws do not protect or safeguard the
rights and identity of Buddhists, but campaigns promoting family planning in
exchange for money. Yet,
Sri Lanka
has a total population of over 20.2 million people, of which 70% are Buddhist.
The
Bodubalasena prohibition of male and
female sterilization came during the group's first national conference, held
last July 28 at the Bandaranayake
Memorial International Conference Hall (Bmich). Besides
this issue, the association has addressed other questions, mostly related to
proposals in the field of education. However,
they only concern the Buddhist community, secular and religious.
Several
times the Buddhist community in Sri Lanka has been shown to have "two
souls": on the one hand, there are those who seek dialogue and the
encounter with the Christian and Muslim minorities in the country, on the other,
there are many who want
to "preserve" a position of greater power and strength within society,
given the fact that they are the religious majority. Thus,
the country is no stranger to incidents of discrimination - sometimes resulting
in reprisals
and violence- by radical Buddhist groups and parties.
However,
this trend is associated with a problem of ethnic and cultural nature, which
contrasts with the poorer Tamil population (12.6%), concentrated in the
northeast of the island, the Sinhalese (74%), richer and widespread in the rest
of the State. (MMP)