Sri
Lanka's nationalist Buddhist monks and their supporters launched a campaign
Sunday to boycott Islamic halal-slaughtered meat amid mounting religious
tensions in the ethnically divided nation.
Thousands
of men and women led by hundreds of monks of the Bodu Bala Sena, or Buddhist
Force, staged a rally outside Colombo to announce the boycott, demanding that
shops clear their stocks of halal food by April.
"More
than 90 percent of the population are Buddhists, Hindus and Christian and
therefore there is no justification to force them to eat halal products,"
Buddhist monk Kirama Wimala Jothi said in a statement.
He
urged Sri Lanka's non-Muslim majority to boycott any product with the halal
label and asked the government to outlaw Islamic clerics issuing such
certification.
The
halal method of killing an animal requires it to have its throat slit.
The
issue has raised new tensions in a country emerging from nearly four decades of
ethnic strife which has claimed at least 100,000 lives, according to UN
estimates.
The
rally came less than three weeks after President Mahinda Rajapakse urged monks
not to incite religious hatred and violence amid reports of a wave of attacks
targeting Muslims.
The
Buddhist Force has disassociated itself with violence saying that there were
"duplicate groups" pretending to be them and stirring up trouble.
Less
than 10 percent of Sri Lanka's population of 20 million are Muslims.
Sri
Lanka ended its 37-year Tamil separatist war in May 2009 with the crushing of
Tamil rebels, who were mainly Hindus.
Hindus
constitute about 12 percent of the population.
