UNQUIET ON THE EASTERN FRONT | May 27th 2008

dreamsjung/flickr

Two monks, two conversations. Soon after meeting the Dalai Lama, James Astill interviews a monk MP in Sri Lanka. He comes away feeling distressed about the country's war and dazed by the breadth of Buddhism ...

When it comes to being nice, few people would enjoy comparison with the Dalai Lama. So, it is bad luck on the Venerable Athuraliye Rathana, a Sri Lankan politician known as the "war monk", that he is the second Buddhist monk I have interviewed in recent days.

The first, the DL, seems--no kidding--little less than saintly. I visited him in Dharamsala, his refuge in northern India, with The Economist's China correspondent, who saw more of last month's uprising in Tibet than any other foreign journalist. The Dalai Lama wanted to hear precisely what my colleague had seen. And where it contradicted what he thought he knew--generally, where the Chinese response had been less beastly than the Dalai Lama had been told--he listened extra hard, and he tried to understand.

It was humbling. So, too, was his tremendous good humour in the face of so much destruction and personal injury. "The situation, unfortunately, looks hopeless," he said, and deeply chuckled. And then: "The Chinese media...the Chinese government site...they denounce me as a demon, as a wolf in a monk's robe, all these things, it doesn't matter. Some people call me a God-king; some people call me a living Buddha; some people call me a demon--it doesn't matter."

Seated in a wicker-chair, in view of the Indian Ocean, Mr Rathana also wears monk's cloth--in russet, where the Dalai Lama wears red. But he is cut from different stuff. A former communist, Mr Rathana entered parliament in 2004 as a member of the new and all-monk National Heritage Party (NHP). It now has nine MPs and provides majority-making support to the government of President Maninda Rajapakse.

One NHP member, Chanapika Ranawaka, is Sri Lanka's environment minister. But Mr Rathana is the best known, on account of his noisy pronouncements on the dangers of global warming, alcohol and tobacco, and on the importance of waging war.

Purveyors of an extreme brand of Sinhalese nationalism, the NHP considers Sri Lanka Sinhalese and Buddhist; they believe that those of other faiths and ethnicities, while welcome, must behave like guests. In effect, this means a policy of zero tolerance towards the complaints of the country's Tamil minority and their self-proclaimed champions, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), known as the Tamil Tigers.

In fact, these two are not the same. Tamils, who comprise around 12% of Sri Lanka's population, have many legitimate complaints. A favoured minority in colonial times, they played a small part in the country's freedom struggle, and have since suffered discrimination. There are few Tamils in the top ranks of the civil service, and practically none in the armed forces. A highly centralised system of government compounds these woes.

The Tigers, on the other hand, are a brutal terrorist group: perfecters of suicide bombing, they have killed thousands of Sinhalese and Tamil civilians, and rule a northern fief partly through murder and extortion. Their paranoid and reclusive leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, has undermined a series of efforts to negotiate an end to the country's 25-year war. This is unsurprising: it is hard to imagine him as a democratic leader. And yet, in the polarising conditions of war, including continuing Sinhalese bullying of Tamils and no moderate Tamil alternative, many Tamils support Mr Prabhakaran, at home and abroad.

The solution, of course, is to isolate the terrorist Tigers from other Tamils. But that is difficult to achieve. Mr Rajapakse's predecessor tried agreeing to a ceasefire and talking peace with the Tigers. Mr Rajapakse is instead attempting to eradicate them in war.

To a degree, war is justified. The Tigers provoked the government into ending the ceasefire by trying to kill several of its members. But the government will be fully justified in its policy only by success, and, after 25 years of failure, this may not come. Far from being won over by this government, many Tamils consider it the worst kind of cynical and time-worn Sinhalese overlord. In particular, many recoil against Mr Rathana and his Sinhalese nationalist party.

"Always the LTTE start discussions when they are weak, they use peace talks to gain strength, and then they return to bloodshed. It will not happen again," he says. "If they give up their weapons, then they can talk. If they do not, we will control them by whatever means."

To many Sinhalese, this is irrefutable logic. As the Indian Ocean comes foaming in, however, it strikes me that the Dalai Lama is, at the least, a more effective brand ambassador for Buddhism.

(James Astill is the South Asia Correspondent of The Economist. This column is part of his week-long diary about Sri Lanka, published on Economist.com.)