There is another letter which I am sending the Pope which will appear at the same sites in a few days. I have invited His Holiness to visit his flock in the concentration camps in Sri Lanka, and on the asylum-seekers boat off Merak, and held without charge or trial in the numerous prisons outside Sri Lanka. If he believes what is in the Bible, they are all God’s children, even those who believe in a different God.
What is going on with the Tamil refugees in the Sri Lankan North and East, and now on the asylum-seeker boats off Indonesia, and in the numerous hell-holes in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and my own country Australia, is not a Christian or non-Christian problem, nor is it a Sinhalese or a Tamil problem but a problem in Human Rights.
I have stressed this in the dozen DVDs I have recorded and distributed world-wide and which are still available for those who want them.
A number of emails have recently come my way asking for prayers for the refugees, asylum-seekers etc. As I said in a talk, a sermon I you like, that I was invited to deliver in the Elim Church in Auckland last March (which has been recorded is in dvd, ), "Prayer without action is dead". I said this in the clearest possible language to the Archbishop of Canterbury in the letters I have referred to, and just a few weeks ago here in Brisbane when I was asked to address a group of Church goers.
I did the same when asked to deliver the sermon in St Paul’s Cathedral, Kandy, Sri Lanka, on St Luke's Day (St Luke was a physician and it was conventional for a doctor to take the service and another to deliver the sermon). I said:
"anyone can come to church and recite prayers and hymns parrot-fashion, but that real Christianity had to go beyond that.”
I said that I expected them to stand up in public and condemn what my aunt, Prime Minister Sirima Bandaranaike, and her goons were doing to the Plantation Tamils, who were dying on the streets in Kandy, and were being transported by me to my ward in the General Hospital Kandy so that they could die with dignity, love and care". If those in the congregation could not, or would not, do that, then all their Church-going was a meaningless ritual. All this is in a booklet called "What I have taught and learnt in Sri Lanka. The musings of a senile teacher" I do have a few copies of this still available if you are interested.
To get back to the Merak asylum seekers, the situation is getting more serious by the day. Some 240 Sri Lankan Tamil asylum-seekers are in a boat tied up in Merak, held there at the request of Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister, Rudd, whom I know personally (he is my Federal member of parliament). He is a Christian and a ‘Church-goer’. May I say that it is a most ‘unChrist-like’ Christian who disregards the “When I was homeless you took me in”, provision, when the people in need of a home have a brown skin.
May I quote the Holy Koran to Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a retired general, the President of Indonesia, and a Muslim, as Barak Obama did in his Cairo speech:
“The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, is as if he has killed all mankind. And the Holy Koran also says that whoever saves a person is as if he has saved all mankind”
This is particularly important now that there has been the unnecessary death of a 29 year old, whose only crime was that he was born a Tamil. He was seeking refuge from a barbaric and murderous regime in Sri Lanka, and died because of a refusal of the Indonesian military authorities to allow medical help, and when they finally agreed to allow this, to the Indonesian doctors to administer minimally acceptable medical care.
Those responsible for the violation of basic human rights, and the UN Refugee Convention (which Kevin Rudd’s country has signed), must be held accountable, just as those in Sri Lanka responsible for the atrocities in the North and East of that country, must be held accountable for what happened in 2009.
All this will be dealt with in a series of articles calling for action which I will publish in the coming weeks.
Right now, we are being carried away by "Christmas" which really has nothing to do with Christianity but a commercialized 'event' sponsored by big business to rake in money, lots of it. This is not to say that the Birth of Christ should not be celebrated (not that there is any evidence that Christ was, in fact, born on the 25th of December, anymore than there is evidence that Buddha on his death-bed declared that Lanka would be the custodian of his teaching, as the ‘Mahavamsa’ – the ‘Great Chronicle’- claims it was). Just for the record, my mother was a devout Buddhist and I went to the Buddhist temple in Attanagalla with her on full-moon days, and to the Anglican Church with my father (and my mother), on Sundays.
Be that as it may, I think the spirit of Christianity, of doing the right thing rather than the easy thing, must go beyond Christmas.
There is one rule that lies at the heart of every religion — that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This truth transcends all nations and peoples, be they white or brown or black, be they Christian or Buddhist or Muslim or atheist. It is a belief that is not new, but has beat in the hearts of billions of people across the world for thousands of years. This is what is means to share the world in the brief time we spend on this earth. This is what it means to be a human being.
In this spirit, I would urge you to get involved from tomorrow (Christmas Day 2009), to commit yourself to getting involved in addressing some of the outrageous things that are going on in many parts of the world, not least to the helpless Tamil people in the North and East of Sri Lanka, and now in the dreadful refugee camps, essentially prisons, in many countries.
Brian Senewiratne Brisbane, Australia
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