The global counter-terrorism measures cannot stop with fighting religious terrorism but also need to look into the basic causes that have fanned the same, especially in the post-9/11 era.
Sri Lanka’s ‘Easter Day serial-blasts’ bring out something that was already known for long, but not acknowledged as much. While other South Asian and also South-East Asian nations with a substantial to near-exclusive Islamic population may have fallen victim of religious terrorism for long, it is possibly in Sri Lanka where a particular community has been targeted, and specifically so.
Of them, nations like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh have near-exclusive Muslim populations. In the case of first two countries, terror-attacks, even while took civilian lives in their dozens, purportedly targeted the State apparatus for backing the US-led war on global terror, and on their respective territories and across their shared borders. Bangladesh may be unique in the sense, it was more aimed at the State, though Dhaka did not seem to have had any special relations with the West, but there again innocent people lost their lives.
The closest that one may have to the Sri Lankan terror-attacks in the region was Indonesia’s ‘Bali bombings’ (2002), in which 200-plus people lost their lives. The dead included over a hundred tourists, including 88 Australians. Maybe, their Christian religious identity mattered to the killers as much as their nationality.
It is in Sri Lanka, where by choosing three local churches as among the six targets, the perpetrators have specifically targeted a community, per se. Their choice of three star-hotels in the national capital of Colombo, where foreign tourists (read: mostly, western, Christian) and their local brethren would gather for special Easter Day breakfast indicates that the killers did not leave out the former, either.
Put it on the head, the argument is that if the killers, who have obviously planned for long to be able to carry out their dastardly design with a lot of explosives and greater precision, had wanted it to happen in Sri Lanka and wanted to keep out the locals, they could have done so. Instead, if the idea was to shock the nation, its Christian community especially, along with the West and the rest, this was the way.
Over the past several decades, Sri Lankan Muslims have felt alienated from the fellow-Tamil speaking sections of the ‘minorities’, thanks to the LTTE’s ‘Kaththankudy massacre’ and the forced ‘Jaffna exit’ (both 1990). This was followed more recently, post-war, by the BBS (Bodu Bala Sena) brand of self-styled ‘Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist’ attacks on the Muslim community, their places of worship and businesses.
In the two instances, peace-loving sections of the local Muslim community, which forms the majority, could not have been blamed, per se. The LTTE suspected the larger Tamil ‘loyalties’ of the Muslims. Possibly, the LTTE wanted the Muslims, too, to accept the outfit’s self-proclaimed status as the ‘sole representatives’ of all Tamil-speaking people in the North and the East.
Focussing on their trade and small business for most parts, spread all across the country with good-neighbourly relations with every community and society, the Muslims had no use for the philosophies and practices that the LTTE propagated. Interestingly, while the LTTE drove the Muslims out of the Tamil-majority North, in the East, where the villages of the two communities sort of alternated one another, there was relative peace, at least until the ‘Muddur massacre’, which in a way was a part of the LTTE process that kick-started the conclusive ‘Eelam War IV’.
Today, the Easter Day blasts may have made the Muslim community across the country feel alienated from the local Christian brethren, as well. After all, almost every Christian felt the same way as his Muslim neighbour when the BBS targeted the latter. The post-LTTE ‘Tamil minorities’ too sympathised and empathised with the Muslims at the time, so did most of the Sinhala-Buddhist majority.
Early social media postings outside Sri Lanka in the early hours and days of the Easter Day blasts had suggested that they were aimed at avenging the ‘Christchurch mosques’ attacks in New Zealand, by a lone attacker. However, as New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been quick to point out, it would not have been able to plan such a meticulous operation (21 April) in less than a month after Christchurch (15 March).
It may thus be better for the world to wait until after the Sri Lankan investigators have pieced together the evidence that they may be able to collect and the inferences that they may be able to collate. They may have lost the head-start in preventing it all when they ignored/over-looked the advance alert provided by Indian intelligence agencies, but then they have enough of it left from their handling of the LTTE investigations of the kind, to be able to piece together the turn of events, with the hope of avoiding such pitfalls in future.
Yet, questions remain if post-9/11 US-led ‘global war on terror’ may near-simultaneously fathered a parallel ‘global war of terror’, going beyond the traditional areas that the western security agencies had targeted then, and rightly so. In India, for instance, most of the pre-9/11 terror-attacks carried the indisputable ‘ISI mark’, from across the border.
When religious terrorism entered the shared Af-Pak territory after the ‘Soviet occupation’ of Afghanistan, the ISI was quick to capitalise on the same, to direct some of against India. The rest, as they say, is history. Yet, even in India, there are more Muslims than Christians, and alienation of yet another community in these parts of the world, cannot be ruled out, either.
In a way, it is not as if the world has to think in terms of the ‘global war on terrorism’. Instead, it has to be even more thoughtful and circumspect as to the ever-enlarging ‘global war of terror’. Sri Lanka may only be the latest, where certain well-defined margins have been breached and consciously so.
The global counter-measures thus cannot stop with fighting religious terrorism but also need to look into the basic causes that have fanned the same, especially in the post-9/11 era. From the pre-War era, the geo-strategic games that extra-regional powers play, the wars that they have fought in third nations, rather than for third nations, have all created irreversible situations for the local communities and peoples.
The ‘Soviet occupation’ of Afghanistan is only the relatively recent example, followed even more recently by the ‘ISIS war’ on Syria and Iraq. The State-sponsors of some of these ‘initiatives’ seemed to have forgotten that the same IT tools that were available for them, were available to the ‘other side’, too, but for an entirely opposite/opposing purpose.
Today, IS has lost Syria, but, then it has new recruits from across the world, who have fanned back to their native lands. They had responded to the call ‘for and of a caliphate’, which was/is only in their imagination. But their imagination seems fertile, both in terms of acceptance of a long forgotten cause and seeking to re-invent the same.
In the immediate circumstance, they have stopped dreaming of the ‘caliphate’ since, or so it seems. But their ‘hatred’ for the ‘other’ has not ended. It is this message that they are carrying back to their nations, including Sri Lanka. They all failed in not being able to track down and stop their leaving home-country, to Syria first, and their return – the latter, especially, was to be more expected than the former.
The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.
N. Sathiya Moorthy is a policy analyst and commentator based in Chennai.
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