Today, Explained - Sri Lanka's Easter attacks

Episode Date: April 22, 2019

Almost 300 people were killed in a string of bombings on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka. Roel Raymond reports from Colombo and Amarnath Amarasingam explains how this attack was both familiar and unprecedented. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for this podcast comes from a TV show that you can watch on the internet. It's called Rami. It's a Hulu original series that's streaming now based on the real-life experiences of comedian named Rami Youssef. It's all about being a first-generation Muslim American caught between an Egyptian community that thinks life is a moral test and a millennial generation that thinks life has no consequences. All episodes of Rami are now streaming only on Hulu. My entire life, people have been asking me how I ended up with a name like Sean Ramosforum. Like, why is your first name normal and why is your last name all unwieldy-like?

I guess the simple answer is, opposites attract. My parents are from the tropical island of Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon. You've got just over 20 million people. The vast majority, around 15 million of them, belong to the Sinhalese ethnic group, and they're mostly Buddhist. The next biggest ethnic group is the couple million minority Tamils, and they're mostly Hindu. But some Tamils are Muslim, and some Sinhalese are Catholic. You could be a Sinhalese, Tamil, evangelical Christian. For a homogenous looking place, Sri Lanka can be like remarkably diverse. And that's how you end up with a name like Sean Rameswaram. My mom is a single East Catholic and my dad is a Tamil Hindu. My dad

wanted to give his son's Hindu names and he won the argument with my brother Nimesh. My mom wanted to give her son's Christian names and she won with me. Sri Lanka is this kind of unlikely crossroads of religious histories. It can be transcendent, but it can also be tragic. And yesterday on Easter Sunday, it was tragic. An Easter morning that will never be forgotten. Worshippers at mass, the victims of mass murder. Eight bomb attacks targeting Christians and tourists in Sri Lanka, and a ninth bomb targeting police. Hotel restaurants blown to pieces.

More than 200 people killed, hundreds hurt. Several Americans among the victims. Yesterday's attack was coordinated and of unprecedented cruelty. It left landmark churches in ruins and killed or named scores of Roman Catholics. I would like to call upon all to pray that all those who are injured may be healed soon and that all these families who have lost someone may be consoled. I condemn, to the utmost of my capacity, this act that has caused so much of death and suffering to the people.

Easter Sunday is one of those days just about everyone goes to Mass, whether you're a good Catholic or a bad one. And I'm a bad one who wasn't planning on going and didn't go, which worked out because I spent the entire morning trying to figure out if my family in Sri Lanka was okay. And it took forever to figure out because the Sri Lankan government did something drastic in the aftermath of the attacks. I would say they were very proactive yesterday. Roel Raymond has been covering the attacks for Roar Media in Colombo. A temporary ban on social media, WhatsApp and Facebook was imposed because they wanted to stop any kind of reaction perhaps spilling out on the streets

because this is not the first time something of that nature has happened. Like even today, there was news that the water lines in Colombo had been poisoned. And the police had to make a statement indicating that no such thing had happened. So there's a lot of fear mongering that happens. And almost all of it happens on social media. And did that outweigh the advantages people ensuring family members and friends are safe people being able to communicate when phone lines go down or they're busy? I can understand where the government is coming from because just last year there were riots in Kandy

against the minority Muslims by the majority Sinhalese. Violence, mainly against the Muslim community, spread to other parts of Kandy district on Wednesday, fanning the flames of hatred, suspicion and fear. All of this came from a post that was on Facebook and WhatsApp saying that the Muslim community were trying to give the Sinhalese community infertility tablets. Completely unsubstantiated, completely ridiculous. 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. And the government at that point imposed a week-long ban on WhatsApp and Facebook. The Telecom Regulatory Commission has blocked access to social media and messaging platforms in a bid to control what it calls the spread of misinformation. So having learned from that lesson, I think the government was very quick this time to impose that same ban on social media. Even with the social media ban, there were false rumors about who perpetrated these attacks. What do you know now about who might have been behind these attacks?

Yesterday, there was a lot of speculation that one group in particular was responsible for these attacks. And this was the National Tawheed Jamaat, a religious Muslim extremist organization that has been around for a while, that has instigated violence on numerous other occasions. Cabinet Minister did say at a press conference this afternoon they were responsible for the attacks. But I have to note at this point, police investigation is not over. Government investigations are still ongoing.

It could be this organization, it could not. Also, I'm not sure if you knew, there was this intelligence report that was circulating that had also indicated that this group would be the ones involved. So right now, all the fingers seem to be pointing at this group. But we're waiting for official confirmation from authorities. Right. I did hear about this letter that the government apparently received saying there would be attacks on churches, perhaps even on Easter Sunday, Easter weekend. Why didn't anyone do anything?

Right now, members of the government have sort of admitted that there were serious lapses in security. But the government has, for a very, very long time, and not just this government, previous governments as well, consistently chosen to ignore any kind of attack on minorities unless it erupts on a major scale, such as what happened yesterday or the riots in Kandy last year. Every single attack leading up to these events have been ignored and just not given the weight it should have been given, especially coming out of a 30-year civil war, when they should have learned how if the root causes are not addressed, these issues will keep cropping up. But I don't think that lesson has been learned. And I mean, just last Sunday, there was an attack on a church. The police did not arrest the perpetrators. In fact, they advised the church and warned them not to bring any worshippers from outside the village into the village. The rap on the knuckles came to the victims, not to the perpetrators. And this has

been sort of the pattern for a very, very long time. Do you think people in the country have faith in the government in this moment, after the government may have totally missed a warning about these attacks, after the government has proven to be sort of hapless with regard to attacks on minorities in the past? Everybody was willing to wait. They were willing to give the government some leeway. But the mood today is very, very different. People are angry at the government and no longer as cooperative, I would say, as they were yesterday. How much more painful is this because Sri Lanka is just now celebrating 10 years of relative peace after a 30-year civil war? The strange thing is, yes, everybody was shocked.

However, what I did note was how many people just fell back into this old pattern because the coping mechanism took over. You just got up, you went you got along with your day. You knew that you had to get into the shops, buy your rations, get petrol in your car. You knew that you had to call your family, make sure that they were safe at home. So things that we had known from 30 years of the war sort of just fell back in place.

But during the war, Sri Lankans had become very very immune to attacks so we didn't react I suppose the way we are reacting now. Today it is very different. Today ten years since the war has ended people are demanding, they want to know, they want answers. These are things that you wouldn't even dream of asking or wanting during the 30 years of civil war. But the grief is much greater because we have tasted, for some of us the first time, what the absence of war was like over the last 10 years. Roel Raymond is an editor at Roar Media in Colombo, Sri Lanka. You can find her work at roar.media or on Twitter at RoarLK.

The Sri Lankan government dropped the ball here, but it might be able to prevent this from happening again. That's after the break. As I mentioned at the top of the show, Hulu has a new original series called Rami. The show is based on the real-life experiences of comedian Rami Youssef and is set in his politically divided New Jersey neighborhood. Here's what it sounds like. You're like the kids in Egypt.

They throw down the government. Big revolution. Then what? No plan. I don't know what I'm doing, man. I look at my parents and how strong they are and how they just know everything's going to be okay because they have God. And yeah, I have sex even though I'm not married.

Where are you going to go? So what? That means I'm not a good Muslim? You can catch Hulu's all new original comedy series Rami on Hulu, where all episodes are now streaming. Before we get into it, can I just have you say your name and how you want us to ID you? Amarnath Amarasingham, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which is a London-based think tank. I'm based in Toronto, but I'm currently in a hotel room in Niagara Falls

with three loud kids in the background. Because Easter Monday is a holiday in Canada. Because Easter Monday is a holiday in Canada, not in the U.S. Not in the U.S. Which I apologize for. It's okay. Thanks for making time for us on your holiday. And I guess one of the saddest things about this holiday attack in Sri Lanka is that while being totally shocking, it's also kind of familiar. Sri Lanka has a history with suicide bombings, but this one feels different. Yeah, I think this

attack right from the beginning, confused me for several reasons. One, we haven't seen this scale of attack in terms of its coordination and this many individuals involved probably since the middle of the war. And so it's been quite a while since we saw bombs going off in Colombo and Nagombo and the east. The second was, of course, the Christian community in the country as the targets, which I don't think has really happened at this scale either. You know, we've seen kind

of general skirmishes here and there. We've seen some reporting of Buddhist extremist groups kind of wandering into evangelical Christian churches saying that they can't do this kind of stuff anymore. They can't practice their religion anymore. They can't convert and proselytize anymore. But this kind of attack, we haven't seen at all. So from the very beginning, it felt familiar, but at the same time, felt bizarrely out of touch with kind of the general tenor of ethnic religious relations in the country as well. I wonder if we could talk a bit about what felt familiar about it. And I think this all comes down to like the method of the attack, just a sort of lone suicide bomber walking into a populated place.

Yeah, I think I mean, for anyone who kind of watched the country during the course of the Civil War from 83 to 2009, suicide attacks in Colombo were not a surprise, right? So buses would get blown up, hotels would get blown up, and religious sites will get blown up, and so Buddhist religious sites would get attacked as well. And so for, I think, a lot of people during that period, it was quite tense because there were curfews, and they would be afraid to get on the bus, and they would be afraid to go anywhere in the morning. They would think twice about going to work or sending their kids to school. And so all of that, I think, is familiar.

And those suicide attacks were perpetrated by the Tamil Tigers, the LTTE. For those unfamiliar, would you mind recounting how the conflict began between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan government? Yeah, so since independence, you had kind of an ongoing debate in the country about the nature of the country itself. So was it supposed to be a Singhala Buddhist country? Was it supposed to be a kind of uniform ethnic and religious identity of some sort? And you had policies put into place from the very beginning that I think placed the majority community up above the rest. So you had the Singhala Only Act in 1956, which made Sinhalese the official language of the country. You had various constitutions over time that elevated Buddhism as the national religion and things like that. And it's around this time in the 70s and 80s where militant movements started popping up in the Tamil community in the north. And so you had a whole slew of them pop up in the 80s and eventually the

Tamil Tigers, by sheer brute force, just kind of became the dominant organization. And they were different in that they practiced a lot of terrorist tactics. They demanded an independent state in the north and east of the country. And they wreaked havoc in capital cities for a long time. And I think the war came to an end in a kind of brutal fashion in 2009, with both sides kind of accused of human rights violations, the use of human shields and things like that, but I think the vast majority of the casualties came on the Tamil side. Despite the ceasefire calls,

the military has vowed to wipe out the LTTE once and for all. These people are heading for refugee camps that are already badly overcrowded, and as the fighting draws to a close, the humanitarian cost of the army offensive is continuing to mount. Ironically, it's the 10-year anniversary this month and next of the end of the civil war as well. So that provides an added kind of sadness to the whole thing. It's worth mentioning that the wounds of that war have not at all fully healed, right?

No, I mean, particularly in the Tamil community in the north, there's still quite a bit of healing that needs to be done. A lot from the Sri Lankan government itself that's being ignored in terms of disappearances, for example, of family members that we haven't heard of since the time of the war, continued detaining and torture, at least a few cases that have been documented by international organizations of ongoing torture and ongoing harassment in the north, ongoing land seizures and converting a kind of cultural erasure,

converting Hindu place names and Tamil place names into Sinhalese Buddhist ones, moving individuals from the south, Sinhalese farmers and fishermen from the south into Tamil areas to kind of redraw the demographics of the country and things like that. And all of that together were what caused the civil war in the first place. Did Sri Lankan Muslims factor into the civil war at all? Or were they mostly on the sidelines? I mean, Sri Lankan Muslims have always had an interesting place

because they've always been victimized by both sides. And so in the early 90s, you had a fairly massive massacre of the Muslim community in several mosques in the east because the Tamil Tigers felt that that the muslims were basically an untrustworthy community amongst amongst them and with the end of the war the sri lankan government's attention also turned to the muslim community pretty strongly so you had in 2013 several mosques that were attacked several businesses that were burned in Colombo. In 2018, similar acts happened. And so the Muslim community, particularly post-war, has borne the brunt of a lot of this kind of single and nationalist or Buddhist extremist agitation.

And how do Catholics fit into this very messy, complicated picture? The Christian community kind of spans the ethnic identity line, right? So you have many Catholics in the Tamil community, many Catholics in the Sinhalese community. You had many Catholics who were in the upper echelons of the Tamil Tiger leadership as well. So Catholics and the broader Christian community fits into this kind of tapestry in interesting ways, but they've never been victimized in the same way that other minorities have, I guess. So that's one of the fundamental reasons that I saw that this attack was probably maybe planned and orchestrated from international terrorist groups, because it doesn't make any sense in the local context to blow up churches and then target Easter breakfasts, either from the local Muslim side or local Muslim groups or Buddhist extremist groups.

It just doesn't fit with the local context in any way. So from the very beginning, I started to think that this was probably maybe local groups kind of coordinating with international ones. Because on the local level, Sri Lankan Catholics and Sri Lankan Muslims aren't in a bad place. They aren't in a bad place. And you would assume that if local Muslim groups had a grievance against anybody, it would be either with the Tamil community or with the Sinhalese Buddhist extremist community. And this is a massively planned and coordinated attack. And just there's no kind of precedent for that kind of hatred. Right. Which is, I think, why it left so many of us confused, right? And maybe worried that the whole world will think that everyone in Sri Lanka is trying to kill each other. I mean, I wouldn't go that far. I mean, I do think at a communal level, at an individual level,

I mean, communities have lived together for a long time. Muslim communities, Christian communities, Tamil communities all live fairly peacefully. They intermarry. And so on a daily, day-to-day basis, there isn't this kind of tension. But there are these kind of groups that are popping up, whether it be Buddhist extremist groups like the Bodh Bala Sena, which was responsible for a lot of the anti-Muslim attacks in 2013 and 2018. And some of these kind of more radical Muslim, I don't know, I wouldn't call them jihadist yet, but they're kind of getting there, which have, I guess, a variety of grievances against the Sinhalese Buddhist regime. But I mean,

yeah, even during the, I think the war kind of, I don't know, smothered a lot of this for a long time, because it was such a LTT versus Sri Lankan government conflict that a lot of other minorities didn't feel like they could have a voice in this dynamic. And perhaps at the end of the war, you're seeing some of that kind of rumbling to the surface as well with other communities now realizing that they have to kind of be at the table and speak about what's been affecting their community as well. Because we saw quite a bit of quieting, I guess, during the war. The government seems to have really dropped the ball in preventing these attacks.

Is there a chance now that it could prevent this from getting worse? Yeah, I mean, I think it really comes from the top. And in particular in this country, the kind of single-ease elite at some point have to get out of their Colombo bubble and recognize that there's a kind of real majoritarian extremism going on, right? What kind of Tamil academics used to call the majority with a minority complex, right? that this community is eventually going to get taken over, that their country that was given to them by Buddha himself is being kind of stripped away from them and given to the Muslims and given to the Tamils, even though we're talking about 7% of the population, is something that needs to be dealt with. And it's something that often rears its head, particularly during elections and other periods. And so if we're going to kind of put an end to ongoing attacks against minority communities I think the

majority has to really address this kind of ongoing extremism within its community it's not it's not obviously the majority of single ease who follow these kinds of things but there is a kind of quite powerful politically influential Buddhist groups in the country, often led by Buddhist monks in orange robes, who are having kind of an undue influence in how we have our conversations, which is quite harmful. Thank you. That's A-M-A-R-A-M-A-R-A-S-I-N-G-A-M. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. Thanks again to Hulu and to Rami for supporting the show today. Rami is a new original series on Hulu,

all about a first-generation Muslim American trying to figure himself out in America. All episodes of Rami are now streaming just on Hulu.