The lessons from Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday misery | M.R. Narayan Swamy

BOOK REVIEW

Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday Massacre: Lessons for the International Community

by Rohan Gunaratna

Penguin Books
Pages: lxxvi + 238
Price: Singapore$ 28.90

It was sheer incompetence at the highest level of governance that helped the Islamic State to devastate Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday in 2019, slaughtering 275 people and injuring almost 600. The suicide bombings were the worst terrorist onslaught by the IS outside the Iraqi and Syrian war theatre. The monumental irony was that the terrorists succeeded in a country which had only a decade earlier stunned the world by crushing the formidable Tamil Tigers.
 
The best (worst?) part is that Sri Lankan security agencies knew for months that Zahran Hashim, the man at the heart of it all, was fomenting trouble of the Islamist variety. There was nothing outstandingly remarkable about him. He was born into poverty in densely-populated Kattankudy, Sri Lanka’s largest Muslim settlement and located in the east coast. Amid escalating global Islamist mayhem, it did not take long for Zahran to embrace extremism and terrorism.
 
Zahran was a fiery Islamic orator and a meticulous planner. He was crude and confrontational with contempt for other religions. He had an unrealistic sense of superiority and exploited others without guilt or shame. As he climbed the ladder of extremism, he would browbeat anyone critical of him. His first victims were adherents of Sufism, Sri Lanka’s traditional and peace-loving Islamic strain which Wahhabis hate.
 
The first time Zahran’s name cropped up at a meeting of the National Security Council in Colombo was in 2015. But no action was taken despite steadily mounting intelligence reports on him. By March 2017, Zahran had become so notorious that Sufis in Kattankudy protested seeking his arrest. In the months ahead, Zahran was identified by authorities as an extremist preacher motivating young Muslims towards IS ideology and as a threat to harmony. Although Zahran went underground in 2017, he audaciously continued to post extremist videos and travel all over the country plotting a bloodbath against “infidels†. Surprisingly, nothing happened even after a huge quantity of weapons and explosives were seized in Puttalam district in early 2019, and the elusive Zahran was linked to the lethal discovery.
 
If all this wasn’t enough, the Indian intelligence came out with a bombshell of a revelation on April 4, 2019, a good 17 days before Easter Sunday. Although not made public then, the message warned that Zahran and his group were about to carry out a major terror strike. There was even information on targets, methods of attack and names of the terrorists. To Sri Lanka’s eternal shame, the information was not adequately shared within the multi-layered security apparatus or acted upon in right earnest.

Again, on April 20, the Indian intelligence tried to get Sri Lanka’s law enforcement authorities to pre-empt the attack or neutralize the threat. Still nothing happened! By then, the terrorists had already done a dry run. Early on the morning of April 21, Easter Sunday, another chilling message came from the Intelligence Bureau in India warning that the attacks were about to be executed between 6 and 10 am that very day.
 
Indeed, the bombs began going off at 8.47 am. From then on until 2.27 pm, four hotels and three crowded churches were targeted, killing and maiming Sri Lankans and foreigners. The last of the twin attacks occurred at the house of one of the suicide bombers. The devastation was bloody and horrific. The targets were overwhelmingly Christians. Reason? The Christian West had smashed up the Islamic State killing thousands.

Some of all this may be known to some people, at least in Sri Lanka. But what Gunaratna achieves in this excellently researched book is to go beyond the Eastern Sunday massacre. He minutely examines the many failures of the Colombo establishment, debunks conspiracy theories behind the bloodbath floated by some Sri Lankans, and underlines the lessons the world can learn from what happened in the island nation.

Even if the intelligence reports were to be set aside, there was plenty that should have woken up policy makers in Colombo. The foremost was the steady import of Wahhabi ideology from Saudi Arabia which, financially backed by Gulf countries (with an axe to grind with rival Iran), began to slowly consume the home-grown Sufi Islam. Over time, the Kattankudy landscape – from its mosques to palm trees – came to mirror the Gulf. Women used to sarees for generations began wearing the black abayas. The common sarong gave way to ankle-length black trousers with white or light long-sleeved shirts. Mosques embraced Wahhabi and the continental Jamaat-e-Islami ideologies. The Wahhabis started to get violent too, frequently attacking Sufi preachers and their properties. Out of sheer fear, hundreds of Sufis converted to Wahhabi Islam. The extremist threats also penetrated the social, educational, economic and political sectors. All this went, most unfortunately, unnoticed by the State. Interestingly, the ominous happenings in Sri Lanka’s east coincided with the steady weakening of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the region.

One reason for this miserable failure was a feeling that an establishment which had mutilated one of the world’s deadliest insurgent groups (LTTE) had nothing to fear. The absence of an external intelligence agency in Sri Lanka also meant that enough attention was not paid to rising waves of global Islamist conflagration. Naturally, the political leadership (Maithripala Sirisena was the president) did not even think that Islamists would target Sri Lanka. National security was badly neglected. Gunaratna says a whopping 350 reports were submitted to various levels of the security establishment on Zahran between January 2015 and April 2019. It was a colossal waste.

Indeed, Sri Lanka was lucky Zahran did not carry out his earlier plan to cause mayhem in all nine provinces at one go. He originally wanted to unleash the attack in 2020. His targets included key infrastructure projects as well as Independence Day celebrations and the hugely popular Kandy Perahera. The nefarious scheme included attacks on emergency services and hospitals when the injured and dying were transported. The aim was to destabilize Sri Lanka without mercy.

It was the discovery of explosives and weapons in a hideout in early 2019 that mainly forced Zahran to prepone the attack. If Zahran had been caught then, the Easter Sunday slaughter would have never taken place. Also, some potential suicide bombers pulled back at the eleventh hour; shortage of manpower made Zahran limit his targets, both in scale and numbers.

Gunaratna rightly says that five decades of identity-based politics since the ethnicization of communities in the 1950s could have made radicalization a relatively easy feat for threat groups. The established leadership within the Sri Lankan Muslim community also overlooked the infiltration of radical and violent Muslims into the social sphere. Finally, weak political and governance apparatus led to Sri Lanka paying a terrible price.

Does the Sri Lanka bloodbath hold lessons for India, home to the second largest Muslim population after Indonesia and where the community has faced some very tough times in the past decade? The answer is yes, going by Gunaratna’s analysis.

The most important is that unless moderation, toleration and coexistence are promoted, and exclusivism disrupted, extremism will take root – leading to terrorism and violence one day. This is a warning that policy makers in India ought to accept wholeheartedly – for the country’s long-term good. The book is also clear that those from outside the intelligence community should not be ‘parachuted’ to helm the intelligence services. (India has faced problems on this score.)

Gunaratna also finds fault with the Sinhalese-Buddhist so-called nationalist groups which, after the decimation of the LTTE, found a new enemy in Muslims. For more reasons than one, Colombo allowed these outfits to take law into their own hands. Naturally, attacks on Muslims and their properties became frequent, only to peak after Easter Sunday. This heavily influenced Zahran and others in the impressionable age to go for revenge.

Not everyone in the web of Islamist ideology in Sri Lanka was a preacher or born into poverty like Zahran. Many were from well-off families, including two sons of the country’s biggest exporter of spices. Others included an aircraft engineer, an IT specialist, a law graduate, a software engineer and a graphic designer. Unlike Zahran, many lived in the prosperous western province which includes capital Colombo. Like in India, the vast majority of Sri Lankan Muslims never had any love for the Islamic State and its hatred-laced teachings. It only needed nine – just nine — brainwashed volunteers to cause havoc in 2019. Is this not a lesson for countries with vast Muslim populations, more so if the community is constantly humiliated and kept under virtual siege?