Gota change

Sri Lanka shouldn't choose to be a Myanmar

IT is hard to be a Muslim in Sri Lanka as it races to be another genocidal Myanmar. The burqa ban and the closure of more than 1,000 madrasahs, schools that teach Muslims religious education, are but the latest ammunition in the Indian Ocean island state’s ethnic arsenal against the close to two million minority. Sri Lanka has 22 million people, 70 per cent of whom are Singhala Buddhists. Hindus and Christians make up the rest. Most recently, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa-led Sri Lanka has made it mandatory for Muslims to cremate the dead, a dictate which is in violation of Islam. The government’s argument is that cremation of those who die of Covid-19 is safer, though there is no scientific basis for such a ruling. On the contrary, the World Health Organisation has ruled burial of those who die of Covid-19 to be safe. Reports are reaching international media that the government is forcing Muslims to cremate the dead, even if the deceased died of other causes. According to The Guardian, 11 affected families, both Muslim and Christian, took up a legal battle against the cremations, accusing the government of violating their freedom of religion and fundamental rights under the constitution. The Supreme Court gave the appeal short shrift, dismissing the case without any evidence being called. Human rights activists in Sri Lanka and in the United Kingdom tell the English daily “the policy is part of an ongoing attack on Sri Lanka’s Muslim community”. Public Security Minister Sarath Weerasekara let this motive slip when he told the press that garments are sign of religious extremism. If this be the case, which it is surely not, then religious garments worn by the faithful of other religions must be signs of religious extremism, too. Let’s be blunt. It is not the burqa of the Muslims nor the saffron robes of the Buddhists that make extremists. It is injustice that turns one to extremism. This is true for the Middle East, Near East or Far East.

And extremism isn’t something new in Sri Lanka. Contrary to what the Sri Lankan government wants the world to believe, extremism didn’t start with the 2019 Easter attacks on churches and hotels that killed 268 people. It has an older vintage. The Sri Lankan government has had a bad history when it comes to dealing with ethnic minorities. The rise and the eventual fall of the LTTE, or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, was arguably the most violent. The LTTE may have not come to life if the then Jayewardene government did not send the army into Jaffna, thereby forcing Tamils to take up arms. Not unlike what is happening in Myanmar. Even in the then-Ceylon of the 1970s, anti-terrorism was an excuse for ethnic cleansing. Not that the LTTE were harmless. Violence begets violence. The 2009 director of the Institute of Race Relations, a UK charity, A. Sivanandan, put it thus in his article on ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka: “The violence of the violated is never a matter of choice, but a symptom of choicelessness — and often it is a violence that takes on a life of its own and becomes distorted and selfdefeating.” Like in Myanmar, with the persecuted Muslim Rohingya gone, the army is turning on its own people. This is not an impossibility in Sri Lanka. But Sri Lanka can choose to be different. And better.

It is not the burqa of the Muslims nor the saffron robes of the Buddhists that make extremists.