On 24 May, a young Buddhist monk set himself on fire near the main entrance to the Temple of the Sacred Tooth in Kandy, Sri Lanka. The burns he suffered were so severe that he soon died in hospital. His name was Bowatte Indaratana Thera, and his suicide was an act of protest against what he believed to be the oppression of Buddhism in Sri Lanka. More specifically, he intended to draw attention to the immorality of cattle slaughter.

There is a problem of ethnic persecution in Sri Lanka. The civil war, which began in 1983, was forged by the persecution of Tamil communities, and when the civil war ended in 2010, it was terminated in violent acts that targeted the ethnic Tamil minority.

Although it is reasonable to expect any election campaign to focus predominantly on domestic issues, it is nevertheless somewhat disappointing that matters of foreign policy have been put on the backburner in this unfulfilling 2010 Labor/Liberal contest. Aside, that is, from the essentially meaningless Tony Abbott mantra ‘turning back the boats,’ and both sides affirming […]