Front Burner - Understanding the Sri Lankan attacks

Episode Date: April 24, 2019

Ever since Sri Lanka was hit by eight coordinated bomb blasts, there have been questions about who could be behind an act of terrorism that targeted churches and hotels and left more than 320 people dead. And while a local group was initially blamed, ISIS is now claiming responsibility. Sri Lanka's Prime Minister says there is some evidence linking the attacks to ISIS. Today on Front Burner, Amar Amarasingam, senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, breaks down what led up to this attack and explains why he fears that local divisions have been exploited by forces outside Sri Lanka's borders.

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is the complicated story of how and why Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou was arrested. How will this impact our lives and technology? Sanctioned. Subscribe at cbc.ca slash sanctioned or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. Ever since Sri Lanka was hit by eight coordinated bomb blasts on Easter, there have been questions about who could be behind such an act of terrorism, one that targeted churches and hotels, killing more than 320 people. I heard about a huge noise, and I jumped into the church, and I saw that my daughter, my wife, was on the floor. Don't claim anyone for the moment. We want peace.

I won't go to church. I don't know what is going to happen to me. And while a local group was initially blamed, yesterday there was another claim of responsibility. From ISIS. Sri Lanka's prime minister says there's suspicion that ISIS was involved, but he's not provided a great amount of detail. Certainly the security apparatus has the view that there are foreign links. And other Sri Lankan government officials have claimed these bombings could be retribution for the mosque attacks in New Zealand. This was a planned attack.

We've received information that Islamic terrorists have attacked here as a counterattack for the attack on the Christchurch mosque, but we are continuing investigations. Today, I'm talking to Amar Amarasingam about what led to this attack in Sri Lanka and why he fears that local divisions have been exploited by forces outside of the country's borders. That's today on FrontBurner. Amar is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and he lives in the Toronto area. Amar, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for having me. So the latest news is that ISIS has claimed responsibility for these attacks, and they've released a video now. And can you tell me what's going on with this? I think from the start of this attack, it was pretty clear that just from the nature of the attack, the nature of the target selection, it became pretty clear that there was some international component here, whether it be al-Qaeda or ISIS. All that we knew earlier was that there were foreign links and that this could not have been done just locally. There has been training given and a coordination which we had not seen earlier. It wasn't immediately claimed by ISIS,

but I think some of us expected something to happen fairly soon. And sure enough, this morning, they have released nothing short of three different releases on it, and they just released photos and a video to accompany all of that. What's taking place in the video, which only runs for about a minute, is seven guys standing in front of what's known as the Black Banner, the Tawheed flag, which I guess ISIS has adopted as their flag, basically giving an oath of allegiance to the leader of ISIS. Right. The name of the group responsible that was in circulation before ISIS claimed responsibility was the National Tauhid Jamaat, which is a little known Islamist group based in South India. And what are they known for and how are they connected to ISIS, if at all, before today? little tricky because Tauhid Jamaat is a kind of umbrella organization that exists in South India, but also has an arm, the Sri Lankan Tauhid Jamaat in Sri Lanka itself, particularly in the east.

There seems to have been a split within that group and the creation of the National Tauhid Jamaat, which is what this attack seems to be linked to. What's unclear is whether these attackers were still current members of the NTJ or whether they were kind of breakaway cell from the NTJ who formed their own alliances with some ISIS contact, which is also unclear at the moment. So there's a lot of Tauhid Jemaat organizations in South India and Sri Lanka. Only one of them seems to be linked to this attack. And even that is not entirely clear whether the seven attackers were current members or maybe former members of the group. Some officials in Sri Lanka have said this could be retribution for attacks on the two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand recently.

And I wonder what you make of that. It's possible it could have been because of the Christchurch attacks. We cannot say yet. You mentioned that ISIS had released several statements. I note they have not talked about Christchurch in any of their statements. So none of the official ISIS releases have mentioned Christ's church, but there's been quite a bit of chatter that some kind of retribution is required, that Muslims cannot just be slaughtered in mosques like this,

that something has to be done. And so a lot of supporter networks and a lot of ISIS supporters online have contributed to that kind of argument. It never really made sense that Christians should be attacked in this manner. There was no long-standing grievance or antagonism between the Christian community and the Muslims. There was no long-standing antagonism between Christian community and even the extremist Buddhist community. So the idea that the largest attack in Sri Lankan history in the last several years would be aimed at the Christian community

came as a complete and utter shock to people. And so it kind of almost makes more sense to say that this organization or these individuals had tied themselves to a more transnational jihadist ideology, which has at its very core a kind of anti-Christian sentiment. So it almost makes more sense given that context than it does with the local context. Right. The argument here that this is part of a broader international borderless project. Yeah, I think groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS, I mean, have launched quite a bit of attacks against the Christian community worldwide. And so this as a response to what happened in Christchurch makes more sense than the kind of ethnic religious dynamics in the country,

given the history of the country. I mean, Sri Lanka is a tinderbox on a good day. So, I mean, violence isn't surprising for most communities, particularly minority communities. During the course of the civil war, you had kind of bombs going off and buses being blown up and religious sites being attacked. But it always came as a shock. We heard a big sound. We thought it was a bomb and we ran to the road.

The rush hour train was packed with commuters when two powerful bombs exploded. The blasts were deafening. They were heard up to three miles away. And since the end of the war in 2009 there's been relative stability, particularly in the capital city. And so this kind of outside attack, I think, was quite a shock to the system. It wasn't, it was kind of out of the ordinary. So the civil war you just referenced, of course, it pitted the Buddhist Sinhalese majority against a Tamil, largely Hindu, minority who were fighting for independence. And that war ended in 2009. Jubilation on the streets of Colombo as Sri Lankans celebrate the end of nearly three decades of bloody conflict.

There are also Christian and Muslim minorities in the country. I know it's complicated, but about 8 to 10 percent of the population. And in order to understand how this Islamist group, the National Tauhid Jamaat, could get a foothold in the country, what can you tell us about what the situation has been like there with regards to the Muslim population? I would say post-Civil War, you had the Tamil community basically quieted and fairly well destroyed with a host of human rights violations, disappearances, torture and detaining and so on. The UN says both sides may be guilty of war crimes, but that the government killed more civilians.

Sri Lanka's war commission heard all manner of testimony. Please consider all the petitions we gave. We hope you'll dry the tears of these mothers. We're becoming ill thinking about our lost ones. And then the attention shifted again to the Muslim community, particularly in 2013, where you saw extremist groups, now with the help of social media and social media platforms basically launch into a fairly wide-ranging series of conspiracy theories about Muslims and their

birth rates and their intentions on the single-East population. So the major kind of first inkling of this was in early 2013 where a fairly small protest against some Muslim businesses that were selling t-shirts of with an image of the Buddha on it soon kind of blew up out of control and online you had several posts kind of comparing Muslims to dogs arguing that Muslim businesses were spraying women's panties with sterilization cream that you shouldn't be shopping at these Muslim businesses because they're really a secret plot to kind of control the Sinhalese population in the country. But their rallies, this group, the Buddhist strength force, use bad language,

likening Muslim imams to animals, or tell the Sinhalese Buddhist ethnic majority not to rent property to Muslims. This is the only country for the Sinhalese, he says, claiming Malaysia, Indonesia and other lands all used to be Buddhist but had their culture destroyed by Muslims. All of this eventually led to several mosques being attacked in August 2013. At least 12 people were injured in scuffles that broke out during the siege, which also saw the mosque pelted with stones. And then you had a kind of major blowout in March of last year.

Again, somewhere online, on Facebook and WhatsApp groups, rumors started to spread that Sinhalese people who were eating at Muslim-owned businesses were being served food containing sterilization tablets, which eventually led to a mosque being burned, a Sinhala youth being attacked in response to that by three Muslim youth, that Sinhalese youth eventually dying, which set the stage for massive riots, which lasted several days, attacking Muslim businesses, vehicles being set on fire, mosques being burned, businesses and homes being looted. Witnesses say a Sinhalese Buddhist crowd broke into Muslim-owned shops soon after the curfew started, looted goods and set fire to them when they were done.

I remember this at the time. Facebook was playing a role there in spreading these conspiracy theories, don't? Yeah, exactly. I think Facebook got a lot of flack for it because this was around the same time that you had the Rohingya issue and Facebook also playing a negative role in Myanmar. Senator, what's happening in Myanmar is a terrible tragedy and we need to do more. We all agree with that. Okay.

But you and investigators have blamed you, blamed Facebook, for playing a role in their genocide. And so there's a lot of pushback against Facebook for how its platform was being used in South Asia. And so Sri Lanka got wrapped up in that. Right. And do you think that explains why the government has shut down social media accounts in the wake of the Easter attacks? Absolutely. Yeah. I think they very much understood that social media platforms are being used to kind of stoke fear and stoke communal division. And they took a step, I think, preemptively to say,

we're not going to allow that to happen this time. This is a much more, much larger attack as opposed to these protests against Muslim businesses that happened in the past. It could really get ugly very fast. And so we're going to take this preemptive step to kind of control the discourse for a bit until tempers cool, I guess, which I think a lot of people criticize them for it from the West. But I think, you know, judging by the context and coming from the country,

it kind of seems like this or seems in retrospect as a smart thing to do. We'll be back in a second. Discover what millions around the world already have. Audible has Canada's largest library of audiobooks, including exclusive content curated by and for Canadians. Experience books in a whole new way, Thank you. The first 30 days of the Audible membership are free, including a free book. Go to www.audible.ca slash cbc to learn more. You know, I'm left with this question, and I think you might go back to some of what you said earlier about ISIS. in Sri Lanka has been oppressed, particularly in the last couple of years, by the Sinhalese Buddhist majority, then why is this Islamist group targeting Christian churches? Well, I mean, this is the tricky part from the very beginning, because it immediately didn't make any sense. Because, I mean, if let's say it was a Sinhalese Buddhist attack,

it should have been targeting, you know, Muslim sites or Tamil sites. Right. Or if it was an attack by Muslims, you would think that it would be on Sinhalese Buddhists, the people who have been oppressing them. Exactly. Or if it was some kind of revival of the Tamil tigers from the past, it should have also attacked, you know, Sri Lankan government institutions or something like that. So this, we've never had, you know, an attack on Christians at this scale. We've never had an attack of this scale period since the middle of the war. And so this idea that the Christians did something that riled up this much anger and this much coordination and this much planning and investment

just didn't make any sense because there were stories that the Bodebala Sena, again, were going into Christian services across some parts of the country, particularly evangelical Christian churches, and saying that you cannot proselytize anymore. We don't like the fact that you're converting Sinhalese into Christianity. But this was a bit mind-blowing and seemed very much outside of the local context and outside of what we know from the history of the country. This seemed more obvious that this was very much controlled from the outside. There's something going on, some other organizations involved here.

It's not a local thing. Six bomb attacks across three cities in Sri Lanka. Most of them occurred within a single half hour. What they show is a level of sophistication and coordination that resulted in one of the deadliest terror attacks in modern history. The idea being the kind of coordination that would be needed for an attack like this. If you just think logistically, the safe houses, the people that would have to drive these bombers to the places, the materials, like this is a massive undertaking that would need months of planning. It's a massive undertaking that would need months of planning, and you would need to be angry enough at a particular community to do all of that. And the only communities that

roused that kind of anger historically have been either the Tamils, the Muslims or the Sinhalese, very rarely against the Christian community. Why do you think ISIS is targeting Sri Lanka? Of all countries, this is not a Christian majority country. Yeah. I would flip the question a bit because I don't think it was a... I'm still very skeptical that it's an ISIS-controlled attack. But what I think happened is that local extremists who were part of this National Tawheed Jamaat

or had broken away from the NTJ because they thought the NTJ wasn't extremist enough, had formed alliances with the Islamic State. And I can imagine, I mean, we don't have any evidence for this, but I can imagine, you know, whatever ISIS operative is involved here basically being like, we're not going to attack the Sinhalese, like that's not going to get us any media coverage. That's going to be fairly well accepted. Whereas if we actually launch attacks on tourists and launch attacks on churches, that is going to gain some kind of broader coverage. And it's also going to turn, ideally, you know, Christian populations in Western countries against their

Muslim populations. And so this is largely what ISIS's broader objective is to constantly put everyday Muslims around the world and turn them all into an object of suspicion by the majority. And if we look at the New Zealand attack, it was very much, and you read his manifesto, it was very much about sparking a race war. You know, he calls it accelerationism and kind of moving already existing tensions to the fringes and making that happen very quickly so that this inevitable race war and inevitable religious war can be sped up so that we can kind of get on with it. Right.

And so this is a very interesting kind of pushback by the Islamic State to kind of feed into that narrative and force individuals, force our societies to become more polarized. Does this scare you? I haven't had time to be scared. I've been kind of heartbroken and exhausted and trying to figure out whether anybody I know has been injured. But I think, I don't know, coming from the Sri Lankan context, we're used to some level of violence and some level of communal disharmony. But I do think the kind of broader social polarization that we're seeing, the rise of white nationalism, the rise of the

jihadist groups is quite scary in that I don't know where it goes. And I don't know where this large scale polarization actually ends up. Right. And I apologize for asking you if it scared you. I mean, obviously, the losses in this attack have been so catastrophic that in and of itself is incredibly terrifying and heartbreaking. And I wonder if I could end this conversation by asking you how your friends and family back home are doing. I think for the most part, everyone's fine. I, you know, I used to find the marked safe feature on Facebook quite annoying, but it was quite comforting this time around. But I mean, partly because we all kind of know Christians in the country, regardless of whether we're Tamil Hindu or Sinhalese Buddhist or Muslim.

but at the same time, quite a strong presence of kind of growing conservatism and growing radicalization amongst some in the community there, in the Muslim community there, which I think also has raised a bit of concern. So it was, yeah, it was a whirlwind of kind of things going on on Sunday, but I think things are calming down now. Omar, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. Thank you. One thing I wasn't able to get to in my conversation with Amar, there have been lots of questions in the past few days over what could have been done to prevent these attacks. Sri Lankan government officials admitted they had been warned earlier about the national Tohi Jamaat and possible attacks on churches. Well, on Tuesday evening, CNN reported that that information came from India and was gleaned from an ISIS suspect.

That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger.

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