Monk backing Gotabhaya wants Tamil owners to stay away from their lands in interior Batticaloa

[TamilNet, Friday, 18 October 2019, 23:43 GMT]
A Sinhala Buddhist monk engaged in hostile colonisation activities in Batticaloa district along the border to Ampaa'rai district has threatened Tamil farmers who were levelling lands at Maalaiyar-kaddu village to stay away from the ‘reservation’ lands on Friday. The Tamil landowners were stopped by the SL Police who accompanied the monk while they were cleaning the property using a bulldozer. The SL Police has instructed the Tamil farmers to come to Vellaa-ve'li police station on Monday. The Tamil families have been doing agriculture in three acres of lands beside the plot which they were levelling. They had purchased six acres of lands from another Tamil landowner 15 years ago, the families said. However, the monk from Chinna-vaththai was claiming that the SL State had reserved the three acres of lands.

Maalaiyar-kaddu, a GS area located 58 km southwest of Batticaloa city, is an interior village in Vellaa-ve'li administrative division of Batticaloa district, and it is situated to the south of Chinna-vaththai GS area, where the monk, Hakmana Kusalananda thero, resides.

Kusalanada thero had put up a Buddhist temple in 2014 at Chinna-vaththai. He is receiving instructions from Ampitye Sumanarathana Thero, a well-exposed Sinhala extremist monk from the city of Batticaloa.

The monks are backing Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. They want to create more Sinhala villages in the Eastern Province.

Chinna-vaththai, bordering with the large Sinhala settlement in Uhana in the district of Ampaa'rai, is home to 45 families of Sinhala settlers and 347 Tamil families.

At Maalaiyar-kaddu, there are 9 Sinhala families and 173 Tamil families, according to the figures obtained from the Divisional Secretariat in April 2018.



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