Points to ponder
I am a regular reader of the Sunday Times--perhaps the only newspaper I make it a point to buy and read every week. That is because, of all other news sources around, print and electronic, I have felt your newspaper has retained a degree of objectivity and impartiality over the years.
I was disappointed on two counts last Sunday (May 5) : one, an article on page 10 which in its first line speaks of ‘Tamil’ terrorism in Sri Lanka. I would have thought, 30-some years later and 10 years after the end of the bloody civil war, we would know that there was ‘LTTE’ terrorism in Sri Lanka, not ‘Tamil.’ This distinction is important given the ever-more fragile and fractious polity that we inhabit.
The second was in the centre-page spread in which the writer laid the blame for the ‘IS-inspired’ terrorism and bombing campaign in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, fairly and squarely, at the door of the Sri Lankan government’s dealings with the US military. The line goes this way: “IS leader’s remarks confirm what was revealed in these columns last week--the increasing military role of the US in SL... This was the cause for IS
building a military machine with Muslim extremists and carrying out bombing attacks
in SL” [my emphasis]. Both this newspaper and other national and international publications have engaged in more nuanced analyses of the multiple triggers of why Sri Lanka, why the Christians in Sri Lanka, etc. by the terrorists. Surely the cause and effect are not so direct and linear?
As many have pointed out, the radicalization began when the China-leaning and (ostensibly) anti-Western Rajapaksas were in power, that they may have unwittingly encouraged the ‘Islamicization’ or ‘Arabicization’ of SL Muslim identity to put a wedge between ethnic Tamils in the North and East and Tamil-speaking Muslims in the very same spaces--and using the latter for intelligence-gathering etc. Indeed, it has even been said that alBaghdadi and IS were unusually late to take responsibility for the Easter Sunday bombings and that the reference to Sri Lanka in his statement appears to have been later tagged on.