My family has had some close friendships with Sri Lankans over the years, my mother and sister especially. The first Buddhist I ever knew was Sri Lankan. Now we hear terrible things in the news. I get an email with loads of info. I write back after a week or more: “Raj, I didn’t reply because I didn’t know what to say: like the rest of the world you are rightly complaining about, I am too swamped to pay attention to Sri Lanka, or to know how to get my head around the issue. You sent a lot of info but I didn’t have time to read it. I’m sorry.”

Raj replies: “Understand Dave! What about this short posting?”

So here it is. I wasn’t entirely honest in my email above: it’s not truly time or info I lack: it’s that I want to avoid the pain of hearing about more tragedy. I think of Alice Walker in a Buddhist magazine saying “You know, what are hearts for? Hearts are there to be broken.” I click on the BBC video…

“What the Govt of Sri Lanka doesn’t want you to see: video from BBC 4

“What a leading independent expert recommends in Foreign Policy magazine

“WHAT YOU CAN DO:
“As with South Africa, Israel and elsewhere, we have to get moderate Sinhalese to care and to give them a voice in the debate which has been taken over by Sinhalese extremists
Campaign against the IMF loan going through – it can still be stopped if enough people stand up and say no!
Lobby the EU to remove special trading privileges.“

About Raj: Raj Thamotheram qualified as a doctor, then helped to start the UK Nuclear Freeze Campaign, was founder director of Safeworld and then was head of advocacy for ActionAid. He now works in the responsible investment field. This posting reflects his personal interest – his family left Sri Lanka after the first anti Tamil pogrom in 1958. Many Tamils have been less fortunate.