Minister of Lands Janaka Bandara Tennakoon a few hours ago denied the allegations made against him regarding the Dambulla Mosque issue by the Chief incumbent of the Rangiri Dambulu Rajamaha Viharaya Ven.
Inamaluwe Sri Sumangala Thero stating ‘they were all wrong.’
Earlier the Thero told this website that the Buddhists and those of other faiths work amicably […]

The 2012 Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia
ASIA SOCIETY:Please join Norman Pearlstine, Chief Content Officer at Bloomberg, and members of the Oz Prize jury to celebrate this year’s winner of the Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia, Fast
Company Magazine’s April Rabkin. Ms. Rabkin, the publication’s Beijing-based correspondent, won the […]

Muslim civil society organisations based in Colombo have organised a city wide Hartal to protest the government’s decision to relocate a decades old mosque based in the sacred Buddhist city of Dambulla.
The city was declared a sacred city in 1982 by an extraordinary gazette notification but the mosque had continued to operate until recently when […]

In a new twist to the Dambulla mosque saga the Secretary of Religious Affairs Ministry in a meeting with officials of the Dambulla Divisional Secretariat held in Dambulla April 24, 2012 discussed an accelerated programme to pay compensation to mosques, kovils and other religious entities to leave the Dambulla Sacred city with immediate effect.
H.S.K.J Bandara […]

Concerned Citizens’ Statement Against Religious Intolerance
It is with great concern that we the undersigned protest against the growing trend of increasing religious intolerance in Sri Lanka with regard to minority religions. We specifically condemn the recent violent attack on the
Mosque in Dambulla by a group of anti social actors. The Hindu community has also been […]

Muslim heavy weights in Mahinda Rajapakse’s government –  Urban Affairs (Senior) Minister AHM Fowzie and Governor Western Province Alavi Moulana came out strongly against the government’s plan to relocate the Muslim mosque at Kandalama in Dambulla yesterday.
They told the Lanka Standard that under no circumstance will they agree to a proposed plan to relocate the […]

Mahinda Rajapakse Sri Lanka’s president has rejected a call by Indian legislators to withdraw soldiers from the island’s former war zone in the north where minority Tamils are concentrated, his spokesman said yesterday.
President Mahinda Rajapakse told a delegation of visiting Indian lawmakers that troops could not be pulled out despite the end of the decades-long […]

The Sri Lankan Government has ordered a mosque relocated after Buddhist monks said the 50-year-old structure had been built illegally in an area sacred to Buddhists and threatened to demolish it.
The monks in the island nation’s central town of Dambulla protested against the mosque on Friday, stopping the Islamic prayers, and threatened violence if it […]

COLOMBO: A visiting delegation of Indian legislators said on Saturday April 21, 2012 that they had urged Sri Lanka to go for genuine political reconciliation, Xinhua news agency reported.
Speaking to reporters at the conclusion of a six-day trip to Sri Lanka, Indian opposition leader Sushma Suwaraj who led the delegation said that they were satisfied […]

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) strongly deplores the alarming escalation in hostile rhetoric and the barely concealed threats of reprisals that have been made against some of the country’s leading
journalists and human rights defenders by representatives of the Sri Lankan government and by state-owned media outlets.
This follows the adoption of a resolution by the […]