Accompanied by Buddhist monks and a senior leader from the extremist Jathika Hela Urumaya party, Sri Lanka’s president addressed an event at the side lines of the United Nations General assembly on Monday.
Maithripala Sirisena delivered a speech at the Nelson Mandela Peace Summit, which was organised in memory of the first black South African president who led the struggle against Apartheid.
Sat in the audience as part of his entourage was the secretary of the Jathika Hela Urumaya, a Sinhala extremist party, Champika Ranawaka, as well as other senior government officials and two Buddhist monks.
Sirisena is due to address the General Assembly later today as part of his visit to the United Nations, where he vowed to protect the “pride of the security forces” and call for war crimes charges against Sri Lankan troops to be dropped.
In 2014, a panel of experts appointed by UN Secretary General to study the final months of Sri Lanka’s armed conflict reflected on Mandela’s legacy in South Africa and compared it to the situation in Sri Lanka.
“The peace in Sri Lanka about which the government brags is based on conquest and fear,” they wrote. “It could not be more the opposite of the peace based on truth, justice, and reconciliation that Nelson Mandela insisted upon for South Africa; and the fate of those two states could also not be more divergent.”