Scary! The way the Nation is slipping down the slopes with no holds or hurdles to stop the steep and fast slide, it is time someone took charge, not just politically and economically, but socially, too. There is none in sight, and post-war light at the end of the tunnel has acquired flaming proportions now after the Easter Sunday serial blasts.
Precisely, this is what the blast perpetrators seemed to have wanted, not necessarily a part of a future ‘Islamic caliphate,’ to which alone IS was/is supposed to have been sworn to. If on day one, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe readily declared – and for a good and valid reasons – that Easter blasts were the handiwork of a local group, with local readily available explosive material, picked up from local markets, it is anybody’s guess why the investigating agencies did not see the possibility of a local and localised motive, not necessarily going all the way up to IS ideology and IS methodology.
This does not mean that the blast perpetrators did not have extra-national, extra-regional motives alongside. The question is if they had local motives, and even more local action plans for successor generations of their kind of terrorists to take forward. If such a construct has purchase, then it should be that there is someone already in hiding, or someone yet to become one, or even be born.
After all, across the world, there are very many instances that terrorists are not born only from existing and existential societies. Even as the original cause might have been strengthened or might have vaporised on the other hand, new generations of terrorists are born to older generations.
In contemporary Sri Lanka, stretching back to the post-Independence birth of a new Nation, the reverse was true. In the case of JVP insurgents, especially in the second phase (1987-89), the Armed Forces massacred tens of thousands of ‘Sinhala-Buddhist youth’ of both genders in the reproductive age group. Today, if the Government can breathe easy on any revival of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist violence against the Sri Lankan State, pro-left or not, it all belongs there.
With the LTTE, the organisation itself contributed its might to the ‘Sri Lankan national cause,’ with Prabhakaran insisting on making his more efficient second-line of the time ‘sacrificial goats’ at the altar of personal pride and institutional ego. Where no such sacrificial goats were required, Prabhakaran butchered the second-line at the altar of his own sense of personal insecurity – exemplified even more in his creating a ‘human shield’ of family members of all those he designated “martyrs to the ‘Tamil Eelam’ cause.”
Docile, disciplined
Barring unfounded LTTE suspicions of the Muslim neighbours of their Tamil ‘subjects,’ the community has been peace-loving to the point of being docile and disciplined. No other community in similar circumstances would have stopped with taking LTTE bullets in the East and their ‘marching orders’ in the North as the local Muslim community did. Granting that they had little or no option at the time, that too when the State that trusted and swore by too was incapable of ensuring their safety and security, elsewhere, some late reaction could have seen an ‘innocent’ Tamil or two, if not a hardcore, well-armed LTTE cadre or more taken out, in retaliation.
Through the decades since the LTTE excesses of 1990 and through the years after Aluthgama (2013), where raw, self-styled Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist hooligans were the perpetrators of anti-Muslim violence, targeting individuals, their businesses, and places of worship, there was any report of any kind, about any Islamic ‘re-grouping’ of any kind. Nor was there even any prediction of such re-grouping, aimed at self-defence of the Tamil militant youth kind, post-Pogrom ’83 or any other kind.
Whatever got reported sporadically, and almost as if motivated, were silly reports about individual Muslim communities and villages in the East looking increasingly inward, and taking to traditional Islamic personal practices belonging to the Gulf-Arab founding region, and not here in Sri Lanka for generations and centuries. Thus, religious sermons, recalling rather than swearing by ‘jihad’ of the commonly-misunderstood kind, forced or voluntary wearing of head-to-foot full body cover by Muslim women came to be reported, as much in the media as possibly by the intelligence agencies – both as sketchy as the other.
Weakness as strength
It is still likely that the blast perpetrators acted for IS, and were a part thereof until death did part them both. If so, they seemed clear in their minds that they needed a local cause, a local cadre to take forward their mission, which alone would have worked, over the medium and long terms.
In doing so, they also seemed to have concluded that the ‘IS ideology’ and their cause of a ‘caliphate’ were alien to the traditional Sri Lankan Muslim ways of thinking and acting. After all, Sri Lankan Muslims were never ever a part of any Caliphate any time in the past, near or distant, for most of them to have even heard the phraseology, to make any sense now.
So much so, even the first of the major ‘ethnic/communal riots’ involving Muslims and Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarians over a century ago did not have ‘caliphate’ as the cause. Of course, the abolition of the caliphate happened a few years down the line, but then, the Indian National Congress fighting for freedom in the neighbouring Nation across the Palk Strait, made it one of its early, major causes for public protest.
The fact is, no caliphate has existed anywhere over the last hundred years or so, for the travel-weary Sri Lankan Muslim youth, with one foot near-eternally in the Gulf-Arab job-market, to have even heard of it, leave alone feel its influence and importance. So, there needed to be a new and localised way of turning the local Muslims against the Sri Lankan State. And the blasts seem to have served the purpose.
If on the day of the blasts and soon thereafter, the Nation’s Christians were seen as the victims, and rightly so, days and weeks down the line, the Muslim community too is made to feel even more ‘victimised.’ Today, everyone seems to have forgotten the real victims of the blasts, but there is increasing news about the ‘victimised’ Muslims, who are getting it from all sides. If in Negombo, post-blasts, the local Christian community attacked them, there have been reports since about ‘Sinhala-Buddhist’ goons targeting them, without any immediate or direct provocation whatsoever, a la Aluthgama, al a 2013.
Yet, the inherent weakness of the Muslim community in the country against defending themselves vis-a-vis State or non-State violence of the kind that the Tamils had suffered in the past is the contradicting geographical spread of the two ethnicities. The Tamils had territorial advantage of contiguous areas with a concentration of their population, across the North and the East. In its time, the LTTE first controlled it and then owned it.
The Muslims do not have the advantage. The geographical distribution of their demography, both in the Tamil East and the Sinhala South, starting with capital Colombo, coupled with their greater dependence of the local communities for trade-centred profits and prosperity, has meant they accepted the cultural diversity of the Nation as their creed even while not diluting their inherited cultural identity, which in turn were confined to the land.
Hopefully and thankfully, they have given up their lives for a lost cause, but then the blast perpetrators from Easter Sunday may have kick-started a process, and so violently, that the Muslim communities inherent weakness of their homes and villages intermingling with those of Tamils and Sinhalese, might have come to be seen as their emerging strength. If the present sense of alienation has its way with the communication era Muslim youth in the country, then Sri Lanka may have to be prepared for a long drawn-out guerrilla war of whatever kind.
In such a scenario, spread-out villages are fine targets for being harassed and getting provoked. And in an urban guerrilla war-like situation, at least the early rounds could belong to them. The last time the Security Forces handled a guerrilla situation, it was not when the LTTE took to big time terrorism, when most Tamil areas had become out of bounds for the security agencies and Armed Forces, without fighting for every inch of it – only to lose two inches, the very next day.
The present generation of Armed Forces and intelligence agencies have only fought conventional war with the LTTE, when it was seeking to fend off LTTE terrorism. It was only in the early stages of Tamil militant youth activity, including that of the LTTE, that the infantile security agencies launched massive combing operations through the Tamil villages and urban localities that they alienated the local population, including their otherwise withdrawn women, so very completely.
Reports today speak of the Armed Forces launching combing operations across Muslim localities, that too under the cover of emergency regulations, enforced after the Easter blasts. The psychological outcomes can only be guessed – and also hoped for, against!
Post-Syria
The success of the Easter blasts lies in the ability of the perpetrators to foresee the split in the ‘religious unity’ among the two minority communities, as different from the ethnic unity, purportedly between the Tamils and most Muslims, deriving from a common language. Yes, the blasts did help draw global attention to Sri Lanka and the state and status of Muslims, not Islam, in the country. A similar blast on any other day would have drawn lesser attention from the rest of the world, even if the toll was higher.
Post-Syria, it is speculated that IS can do with new territory, especially if there can be some action. The blast perpetrators have ensured the latter, and IS may have been waiting in the wings to take over some of the former. In choosing Sri Lanka, be it IS Headquarters or the local perpetrators or both together, seem to have predicted why and how political parties, their leaders, and individual communities, and their leaders, would all act and/or react.
Sri Lanka is strategically located, over which alone the US and China are having their shadow-boxing, especially after the incumbent Government leadership came to power in 2015. The LTTE has proved for them that they too could fight a long and sustained war, if they were willing to join a fight of whatever kind, whenever and wherever – land and/or sea.
Yet, Sri Lanka may not be ready to offer IS ‘Stateless people, for a faceless leader,’ which is what al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden made out of Afghanistan. That is what IS attempted in Iraq and Syria, but again failed. Yet, Sri Lanka may be among the Nations ripe for attempting the same, even if it too were to fail!
Courtesy: Ceylon Today 11 June 2019
http://www.ceylontoday.lk/print-edition/3/print-more/32768
