Today, Explained - After the smoke clears

Episode Date: April 30, 2019

Sri Lanka is both returning to normalcy and struggling with last week’s Easter attacks. Roel Raymond provides an update from Colombo and Amarnath Amarasingam explains how nations can battle extremism without violating human rights. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You ever go see like a big blockbuster superhero movie and think like, man, this is great, except for the fact that like all the female characters are super one dimensional and used as crutches. There's a new original podcast from MailChimp called Going Through It, where 14 different women tell 14 super dynamic, compelling stories about their lives. You can subscribe and listen now wherever you listen to your podcasts. I was working last Tuesday morning when an aunt of mine sent me a message. She said her best friend's aunt and daughter had died in one of the hotel bombings in Sri Lanka.

The whole family was at the Shangri-La Hotel in Colombo for an Easter buffet. Her friend's aunt and daughter went to get dessert and then the bomb went off. The two of them died, everyone else in the family lived. The two of them died because they went to get dessert. My aunt sent me a selfie her friend's daughter had posted on Facebook minutes before she died. Everyone's smiling. Everyone's happy. These messages my aunt sent kind of destroyed me. Last week, I had to go pretty quickly from make sure family in Sri Lanka is okay to make a podcast about the attacks. Hearing this one tragic story forced me to sort of slow down and think about what was lost. Roelle Raymond, the reporter from Roar Media in Colombo I spoke to last week, she more or less went through the same thing.

I think it's been, for me personally, i can't say i don't know how to how to say it i mean it took its toll let's say a week later it took its toll by last evening i was at the brink of collapse but um i don't think i was really thinking about it at that time it was more about getting the news out really fast finding out what was happening not just for myself but also for other people who were following and wanting to know and fielding a lot of calls taking a lot of calls going to as many places as I could so yeah I was very busy and I didn't really have time to even perhaps accept or understand on a human level or personal level what had happened. And it's only now there's some sort of, there's a sense of anxiety, which I can't really explain.

There is a lot of pain. I'm very sad about what has happened to my country. I think people have an understanding now of what has happened, I think also because this age of social media, people are using VPNs to get online and piecing together what happened based on information that's being reported. So although the government hasn't in many cases

explicitly said this is what happened or this is the person behind it, people have already pieced together the story. In Sri Lanka's east, police were edgy today as they raided a base of an Islamist group linked to last week's devastating terror attacks. It seems that this one guy, the leader of a local Muslim extremist group,

the National Tawheed Jamaat, his name is Zahraan Hashim, he was an imam. It seems that he was the mastermind behind this. A lot of his family members were involved. We heard that his sister, one sister, who somehow seemed to have escaped all of this and didn't really know what was going on, had told the media that members in her family had died in this whole fiasco. 15 people have died, including six children, after a security operation in eastern Sri Lanka.

Troops raided a suspected safe house close to the hometown of the alleged ringleader behind last weekend's attacks. Gunmen opened fire on security forces before three men detonated explosives. What more do we know about this guy, Mohammed Zahran Hashim? So what we're hearing is that he was born in Kathankhudi in the eastern province, that he

didn't come from a very affluent family. We hear that he had his early education at a madrasa and how as he grew up he began to question what was being taught to him because he had a different interpretation and opinion and it got to the point that he was kicked out of that madrasa. We learn that later he got very much more fundamentalist in his thinking. Then he set up the National Thawid Jamaat himself, set up mosques in the name of the National Thawid Jamaat. But it got to the point

where even the National Thawid Jamaat kicked him out later for his sort of radical extremist ideology. We heard that he was a very persuasive speaker, that he would get as many as 2,000 or 3,000 people to listen to him. And a lot of his preaching happened online, on Facebook, on YouTube. So it seemed that he was just, I don't know, from my lay person's point of view, an angry, misguided man with a score to settle. And there's been these reports that he had ties to like one of the wealthiest spice traders in Sri Lanka. What's all that about? Of the suicide bombers, two were sons of a wealthy spice merchant

who was very well accepted in the business circles, who was accepted in the political circles. The speculation, even from the prime minister, is that it's quite possible that this man didn't know what his sons were doing, although he is also now under arrest. Last week when we spoke, we talked a bit about how the government had warnings about these attacks, but failed to act on them. What more have we learned about how much the government knew? Well, the government has now confirmed repeatedly that the intelligence was definitive. The prime minister himself actually did confirm that this was intelligence that was received. What's even more damning is the fact that India confirmed or India said that they had sent three alerts,

the last of which came just hours before the attack. So the warnings had definitely been communicated to Sri Lankan authorities, but they were not acted on. I have explained before how on a political theater this turned out to be a blame game because the prime minister thinks the president should be held responsible for this lapse in security, whereas the president thinks that the prime minister is the one who weakened the country's intelligence by going after military personnel for alleged war crimes. So there was this spat initially midway during the week with both parties pointing fingers at each other. And of course, the government now, maybe it's overcompensating. It's certainly taking many actions on many fronts.

Could you run us through everything the Sri Lankan government is now doing to investigate this and perhaps prevent an attack like this from happening again? Yeah, it does seem like they're on overdrive, in fact, in ensuring that this doesn't occur again. And I'm pleased to note that even if belatedly, whatever has to kick in has kicked in. There's some 7,000 soldiers, army soldiers in Colombo alone. The rest of the army is deployed all over the island.

There's extensive search operations ongoing. The president said every house would be searched. A database would be set up so that people know if anyone unknown to the area moves in. There's naval patrolling going on, there's air surveillance, sniffer dogs on the roads, barricades in certain areas. All the key places of business and public places are definitely being protected. In addition, the president, under emergency regulations, not only did he ban the national or said he would ban the National Tawheed Jamaat and the Jamia Thul, Milithu Ibrahim, another nationalist Muslim extremist organization, he also said that all face covering, he didn't use

the word burqa, but he did say all face covering would be banned under emergency regulations. The emergency measure was announced by the president's office last night. It had been discussed last week, but postponed until government officials had a chance to consult with Muslim clerics. Were any of the terrorists who perpetrated these attacks wearing face coverings? No, definitely they weren't. However, the fear of more attacks, and there have been more internal security memos leaked to the public saying there would be attacks. In fact, two other Muslim sects were supposed to be targets of these attacks.

I think with this ongoing fear of more attacks, it's becoming more and more important for the police and the armed forces to be able to identify people. And it's, I think, for that reason that they want people to no longer cover their faces. They haven't said anything about the hijab, so it's not about covering your head. It's just that they want the face visible. I think it's mostly to do with tracking down people and just easy, easy identification. Do you have any sense of how Muslims in the country feel right now? I mean, I do genuinely feel that they feel violated, but at the same time, they are very cooperative because unfortunately, I feel that the biggest victims to this attack are the Muslims themselves.

Because one extremist group of Muslims perpetrated a series of attacks that has caused the entire still going to be wary now going forward, which is, for me, possibly the saddest thing. How about the rest of the country? I mean, the government reported last week that they were planning on going door to door to root out terrorists, which I don't know if I've ever heard anything like that from any country after a terrorist attack. How are tensions in the country right now? I think, strangely enough, people perhaps feel safer with the armed forces coming door to door because then you can establish the fact that you have nothing to hide and people who do have something to hide will be caught out.

Also, I think the main thing that we need to, like a lot of people need to understand is Sri Lanka has gone through this before. In fact, there are some complaining they don't see enough in some areas and they wished there would be more armed forces out there on the ground. So I don't think that has been received very badly. I think people are just very keen to ensure they are secure. There's high tension. There's definitely high tension. People are avoiding public places. They're avoiding stepping out as much as possible.

If you are running an errand, you try to get from point a to point b as fast as possible you don't dawdle it's the topic on everyone's mind it's the first thing you talk about it hasn't been forgotten the fear is very real and very present that hasn't i think abated but people are being forced to get on with their lives. It's been a week now. The streets are a lot quieter, but people are now being forced out of necessity to get back to working and getting along with their lives. But the fear is present, and they are afraid that at some point something will happen and there will be another attack. Roelle Raymond covers Sri Lanka for Roar Media. You can find her work at roar.media. The Sri Lankan government is taking lots of action, but all told, it might be taking the wrong kind of action.

That's next on Today Explained. So I've given you some general information about the Going Through It podcast from MailChimp. Here's a bit more on the specifics. There's an episode up right now you can listen to featuring Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton talks about what happened in her life when she was afraid she couldn't hack it and wanted to give up. Anne Friedman, the host of the show, talks with Hillary about her imposter syndrome. Did you know Hillary Clinton had imposter syndrome? They also talk about the intimidation that comes with bigger challenges and pushing forward and pushing for bigger things instead of quitting. Super powerful people. They're just like us.

Anyway, the whole deal with going through it and sits down with writers, comedians, politicians, musicians to hear about the pivotal moments in their lives and careers and relationships when they had to decide whether to quit or keep going. All of the episodes of the show are out now, so you can subscribe and just consume the thing all in one evening or a weekend or over the course of a very emotional week. Amarnath Amarasingham, when we spoke about the attacks in Sri Lanka last Monday, you said this didn't look homegrown.

Outside groups had to be involved. And it turns out you were right. There were links to the Islamic State. Why would the Islamic State want to mess with a relatively peaceful tropical island in the Indian Ocean? Yeah, I mean, I don't think the question is why did ISIS target Sri Lanka? It's much more so that there are local groups in a variety of different countries, South Asia, Southeast Asia, parts of Africa, who are kind of galvanized by local grievances, who are making contact and interacting with members of these transnational terrorist groups who are using it for kind of branding their own movement. Because for ISIS, it's very much part of their repertoire to attack tourist sites and attack Christian communities, because they realize that it creates much more media coverage, it creates much more kind of international coverage, as opposed to being if these local

groups that attacked this Sri Lankan government site or something like that, which would have made a splash maybe for a day or two and then vanished, whereas now you've killed several citizens of several countries. You've kind of galvanized the global conservative Christian movement as well to say that there is an ongoing war on Christians internationally that local governments are not doing enough to protect. And so this, you know, feeds into several different narratives happening in North America and Europe as well. Welcome to Tucker Carlson tonight. The holiest day of the Christian calendar turned to tragedy yesterday, as you know, in Sri Lanka. This was a message that there's basically a war on Christianity

from a certain segment of the Muslim population. It is literally a holy war. And so Sri Lanka seemed like as good a place as any to stir up religious tensions? Yeah, I mean, I think it feeds into kind of long-running Islamophobia in the country. I think we forget sometimes that brown people can be just as racist as white people, right? And that there is kind of a long-running anti-Muslim sentiment and anti-Muslim hatred in the country. I mean, regular Tamil people and regular Sinhalese people often also feel very kind of uneasy about the niqab

and face coverings and so on, just like you would have most people in Europe or a good chunk of people in Europe and North America would similarly have sentiments like that. And I think just a kind of response to this scale of an attack I think is also creating this impression that there are kind of simple solutions to this. You can just do one or two things like ban the niqab and all of a sudden we'll be back to normal, you know, and we'll be back to a kind of peaceful situation, which I think is going to prove wrong pretty quickly. Sri Lanka is no stranger to suicide bombers. Is it fair to say that these attacks coming from international religious extremists are a new thing for the country?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's an element to which the violence during the Civil War was normalized. People had kind of gotten used to being uneasy and kind of got spoiled by 10 years of relative peace. And therefore now there's this newfound fear that this isn't just a short-term thing or just a one-off attack, that this is part of a longer campaign that they need to be vigilant for. And part of the way you're vigilant for it is to stamp down on minority communities and minority rights. I think that's going to prove to be not a smart choice and not a smart move, the way you're vigilant for it is to, you know, stamp down on minority communities and minority rights. I think that's going to prove to be not a smart choice and not a smart move. But I think generally the way this country goes and generally the way the politicians kind of play crisis

sometimes is to violate human rights with heightened surveillance and heightened harassment of community members, which, you know, one would hope that after 10 years of peace and 26 years of conflict, you know, you've kind of learned the lesson and not to do that kind of stuff. It doesn't actually work. It doesn't actually help. But as we're seeing, I think none of the lessons of the past 30 years or so have been actually internalized by the government. I mean, what Roel was saying earlier was that, you know, some people actually feel much more secure right now in the country because the government is taking the kinds of actions it is saying they're going to go door to door, saying no more face coverings. You're saying in what you've studied in your research on terrorism, that stuff not work, it actually further marginalizes the communities, further creates resentment that they're somehow on YouTube and WhatsApp and Facebook of Muslim community members are unbelievably angry at the attackers because they realize, and there's a lot of sadness there, about what's going to happen to the community. And there's a lot of anger at the attackers to say, you know, you've basically taken the community back a thousand years.

We're never going to be trusted again. People are never going to look at us the same way again. There's been rumors of kind of Muslims being registered in the north. There's been rumors of kind of individuals being kicked off buses because they're carrying a package that's slightly larger than what people are comfortable with and things like that. And I don't think any of these things are going to help in the long term to kind of move things forward. What could the Sri Lankan government do to ensure peace in the country while not infringing on the human rights of Muslims in the country? They handled it somewhat well in terms of the social media crackdown

and at least an attempt to kind of stamp out misinformation and disinformation online. But I think their real-life response has been a bit of a joke. It's just been political blame game and kind of figuring out a way to make this a national security issue. Whatever positive response is actually arising out of this attack has actually come from the Christian community remarkably, where they've, particularly during Friday prayers, many in the community came out to say that they will protect the mosques from attack and make sure that these things don't happen. And so I think there's room for communities to kind of respond in those kinds of ways, but it could have really been supported and pushed from the top,

but we haven't seen anything like that happening. From the top down, I mean, it's fundamentally important to make communities feel like they're part of the country, right? And I think Sri Lanka has always struggled with that from independence onwards, to fully make sense of the minorities among them and minority political concerns among them, because it has always been pitched as a single national Buddhist state, and they didn't really know how to respond properly to kind of integrating communities. So that would have been the ideal response. And that's been the ideal response when other countries have struggled through this, where you hold national vigils, you have a national conversation people conflating the horrific acts of terrorism with the beliefs of an entire faith.

And of course, recently we've heard inexcusable political rhetoric against Muslim Americans that has no place in our country. I've said many times, Mr. Speaker, we are a nation of 200 ethnicities, 160 languages. We open our doors to others and say welcome. And the only thing that must change after the events of Friday is that this same door must close on all of those who espouse hate and fear. Welcome to your new home. You'll find our winters are

a little colder. The way Prime Minister Trudeau in Canada went to the airport after there was some controversy around Syrian refugees and accepting Syrian refugees to provide winter jackets to Syrian refugees who were landing at the airport.

We've got some stuff for you. Wonderful. We'll load you down with stuff. We're out of words how to thank you. You are home. Thank you. Welcome home. Thank you.

Things like that, I think, go a long way to kind of creating an important point of leadership to say, you know, this is what our country represents and this is what we're going to do, regardless of what the kind of domestic controversy around these issues are. So some countries are kind of have a history of doing that, have a culture of doing that, where I think it's very outside the norm to have those kinds of discussions in Sri Lanka to begin with. Amarnath Amarasingham is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

It's an organization that tries to come up with solutions to extremism and polarization around the world. I'm Sean Ramos-Firrum. This is Today Explained. Thanks to the MailChimp original podcast Going Through It for supporting Vox's original podcast Today Explained. Going Through It features 14 different women talking about their great successes and their great setbacks and failures. You can subscribe and listen now wherever you listen to your shows.