New Front in an Old War
Behind the Sri Lanka Bombings
sri lanka’s christian community endured decades of civil war without seeming to make an enemy of the country’s Muslims, a fellow minority group. That apparently peaceful coexistence made the vicious Easter Sunday bombing of churches and hotels especially shocking. The Islamic State militant group (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the strikes, which killed about 253 people, according to the country’s Ministry of Health. But while the attack may have mostly targeted Christians, its deeper damage may be to the fraught relationship between the nation’s Muslims and its Buddhist majority.
“An attack like this gives nationalist Buddhist elements a pretext to argue that the country’s Muslims are disloyal,” says Joshua White, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy program and Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
Already, in the days after the bombings, Sri Lankan Muslims were on the defensive. “There have been reports of discrimination towards Muslims in the wake of the Easter Sunday attacks,” Raisa Wickrematunge, editor of the Groundviews media project, which is affiliated with Sri Lanka’s Center for Policy Alternatives, tells Newsweek. “A number of Pakistani refugees, some of whom are Ahmadi Muslims who have been targeted in their home country, have been fleeing Negombo. There has been a call to ban the burqa, in response to the attacks, being shared on a number of Facebook pages. On the Facebook pages of some mainstream broadcast channels, there has been a spike in racist commentary. There are fears around a backlash. The mood in Colombo is somber.”
Babar Baloch, a spokesperson for the Office of the United Nations high commissioner on refugees, warns that “refugees and asylum seekers continue to be in a state of fear and uncertainty” and that “some have reported to be targets of threats and intimidation.”
A decade ago, the South Asian island nation ended a 26-year civil war rooted heavily in ethnic and religious frictions. Both Christians and Muslims complained of persecution by the Buddhist majority. The Easter attacks appeared to open a new front in a country accustomed to
sectarian violence—and raised fears that the Buddhist-muslim conflict in other Asian nations was finding its way to Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka’s internal strife has historically centered on the largely Sinhalese government—predominantly Buddhist but including some Christians—and the Tamil Tigers, separatists from a mostly Hindu ethnic group that has a sizable number of Christians. In 2012, Sri Lanka’s population was 70 percent Buddhist and 12 percent Hindu, while Muslims and Christians (mostly Roman Catholics) each accounted for less than 10 percent. Ethnically, the country was about 75 percent Sinhalese, 15 percent Tamil and nearly 10 percent Muslim.
The Tigers, who were defeated amid a government onslaught in 2009, have been blamed for various atrocities committed during the civil war against Sri Lankan Muslims, considered a separate group known as Moors. In recent years, however, Muslims—those born in Sri Lanka and abroad—have been targeted by Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist groups who seek to suppress the identity of all minority communities, viewing them as foreign elements in a country where Buddhism has long been the major religion.
“Muslim vs. Christian was never the master cleavage of Sri Lanka. It was Sinhala vs. Tamil,” says Ashutosh Varshney, director of the Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University.
“Given that the Sinhalese are both a majority community and primarily Buddhist, dominating the state and its functioning, the [historical] political and cultural grievances could, in principle, be made antibuddhist,” Varshney says. “But to make them anti-christian defies comprehension. There have been some Buddhist-muslim clashes in recent years. But Christians and Muslims, both religious minorities, have never fought, at least in a noticeable way.”
The Easter Sunday attacks were “likely to reinforce the social discrimination against the Muslim minority community by some segments of Buddhist society and create new rifts between the two minority religious groups,” says Anubhav Gupta, associate director at New York’s Asia Society Policy Institute.
In nearby Myanmar and Thailand, tensions between the ruling Buddhists and separatist Muslims were already simmering. Myanmar continues to be plagued by inter-ethnic clashes on multiple fronts, including the majority-buddhist government’s battles with the Muslim Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army in western Rakhine state, where the military has been accused of ethnic cleansing against civilians. Thailand has faced an insurgency waged mostly by hard-line Malay Muslim factions, also against a government dominated by Buddhists.
These conflicts have affected the stability of these countries to varying degrees; the State Department has issued travel advisories for both nations. Following the April 21 massacre, the department warned that “terrorist groups continue plotting possible attacks in Sri Lanka” and upgraded the country to Level 2—the same as Myanmar—“due to terrorism.”
The Sri Lankan government blamed a local hard-line Muslim organization, National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTJ), for the attacks, and dozens of suspects have been detained. But an international element could add a dangerous new dimension. Nationalist Sinhalese Buddhist groups, such as Bodu Bala Sena, have been linked to like-minded groups abroad, such as Myanmar’s Buddhist 969 movement, which is also accused of targeting Muslims. Fears of a powerful cross-border jihadi element could provoke a devastating reaction.
Elsewhere in Asia, Isis-inspired attacks have targeted churches in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, and in the Philippines, an overwhelmingly Christian nation with an Islamist insurgency in the south. ISIS has also used the conflicts in Myanmar and Thailand as propaganda to urge Muslims to take up arms in the name of global jihad.
“Those within U.S. government circles have observed with growing anxiety over the past few years the political marginalization of the Muslim community in Sri Lanka,” says the Brookings Institution’s White. “It’s not a surprise that we’ve seen the emergence of radical groups.”
Mathiaparanan Abraham Sumanthiran, a Christian Tamil member of Sri Lanka’s parliament, says his group knew what it was like when “the entire community was stigmatized” for being part of the Tamil Tigers. “It falls on us, the other communities, to now stand by the Muslim community in the face of various kinds of threats against them,” Sumanthiran says. “The security sector also should take extreme care when they apprehend suspects and not use a heavy hand in dealing with them. Presently, the whole Muslim community stands together and against this barbaric attack. That must be preserved.”
“Muslim vs. Christian was never the master cleavage of Sri Lanka. It was Sinhala vs. Tamil.”