Local community brotherhood organisation seeks to heal religious rift in Sri Lanka
Promoted by the National Peace Council, a network of groups seeks to prevent ethnic and sectarian hostility at the local level. One proposal would see all children learn the country’s three languages while another would develop between children in the north and the south.
Colombo (AsiaNews) – The Community Brotherhood Organisation seeks to bring together various religious and civil society groups to promote peace and harmony among Sri Lanka’s various communities.
Starting locally, the aim is to solve religious conflicts through joint actions that avert hatred in a country marked by a long civil war as well as other, more recent wounds, most notably the 2019 Easter massacres.
To this end, some 100 representatives from 45 local NGOs and grassroots groups met a week ago in Negombo, Gampaha district.
"The idea is that, religious tensions not be addressed only at the national level, but also in individual districts,” says N. Vijayakanth, programme facilitator and an assistant manager of the ARC programme of the National Peace Council.
This project “has already been started in 14 locations in 13 districts. Soon all the representatives will gather in Colombo for a training session and prepare proposals to be handed over to the government."
“Identifying priorities within each district, forming reconciliation committees at the village level, training school teachers, organising interfaith discussions and talks at the local level, using technology to share information” are but some of the activities planned, explained Wasantha Kumara, coordinator of the Community Brotherhood Organisation.
One proposal involves “including all national heroes in school textbooks, developing programmes to teach all three [of Sri Lanka’s] languages[*] to children from an early age, building relations between children in the north and south of Sri Lanka," he said.
“I think our society needs to heal. If people are against each other on religious or ethnic grounds, it will only lead to the country’s destruction,” said Manel Fernando, who represented the Janavabodhaya Kendraya organisation at the Negombo meeting. “We believe that if we even start something small in our area or village, it will have a big effect."
“Recently right here in Negombo we saw conflicts,” lamented Sudarshana Fonseka, representative of the Focus Club. Divisions “still exist in different forms but being able to develop local capacity to deal with them will be very valuable.”
[*] Sinhala, Tamil, and English.
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24/10/2022 15:30
