Sri Lanka poll reminder not to conflate religion, practitioners
“BRING Back the Guillotine”: there seems nothing useful to add to the worldwide outrage already expressed about the brutal terrorist attack on the offices of the French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday which killed the editor, several cartoonists and other staff, and two policemen.
The gist of the debate on the topic on social media seems to be that the journal was racist and xenophobic about Muslims, but that it had the right to be so because freedom of expression should not be circumscribed. That’s fine as far as it goes.
Not having studied its famous/ notorious cartoons too closely, one risks sharp correction. But it did seem the journal did not so much attack Islam per se, but rather those who abuse it to justify intolerance, hatred and violence.
In any case, another event yesterday halfway across the world is a useful reminder not to conflate a religion and its practitioners. Sri Lanka held presidential elections where the long-time incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa faced an unexpected challenge from one of his own erstwhile cabinet ministers, Maithripala Sirisena. He defected from the government in November to join an alliance of opposition parties, taking 25 parliamentarians with him.
Though Rajapaksa is a wily fox who deployed all the advantages of incumbency, the election still seemed too close to call as the polls were closing yesterday. If Rajapaksa loses this election, it is likely to be because Sri Lankans have grown tired of the corruption, rampant cronyism and nepotism, and general poor governance which have become entrenched during his decade in office.
Two of his brothers are ministers, another is the speaker of parliament, and nearly 40 other relatives hold various major and minor posts, according to the New Yorker.
Rajapaksa ought not to have been running for office at all, but he recently changed the constitution to remove presidential term limits.
The burning issue of Sri Lanka, for at least Western foreign observers and certainly human rights activists, was apparently barely an issue at all in this election.
And that is that those responsible for committing atrocities in the long and bitter war against the Tamil Tigers, which ended in 2009, have still not been held to account.
Rajapaksa presided over the government when its army indiscriminately fired artillery into concentrations of Tamil civilians at the climax of that war, among other alleged atrocities, killing as many as 40 000, the UN has said.
To those who might still cherish stereotypes about religions, the surprising thing is that Rajapaksa is a Sinhalese Buddhist, as are the majority of Sri Lankans, including those accused of the wartime cruelties against the Tamils (who are Hindus).
His critics accuse him of allying himself with Buddhist nationalist groups, refusing to hold them accountable, even as they have also turned on Sri Lanka’s Muslims, the country’s other significant religious minority.
“With the explicit support of the government and the army, Buddhist chauvinists have been colonising – there’s no other word for it – Hindu and Muslim areas, renaming towns in Sinhalese, planting pagodas where there were once temples or dargahs, and rewriting history along Yorker claims.
None of this is the sort of behaviour one would expect from the purported religion of peace. But welcome to the real world.
The Hindus and Muslims were, unsurprisingly, all expected to vote against Rajapaksa. Their problem is that his chief rival, Sirisena, is also a Buddhist and also courted the Buddhist nationalist vote. Though not as vociferously. And he promised to permit the investigation of the war crimes as well as corruption.
Whether he will win and, if so, really do what he promises, of course remain uncertain. But he does (or perhaps, when you read this, “did”, if the results are already out) at least represent some hope for the victims of 2009 and for an end to the subsequent religious chauvinism. Needless to add, not all Buddhists are violent chauvinists.
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