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Thursday, 17 July 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
The Sri Lankan Government is making a grave strategic error which compounds the potential for separation of the north and east. That error is to permit the BBS, Sinhala Ravaya, JHU et al to alienate the Muslim community from the national mainstream. This may have at least four seriously damaging effects:
(a) It would hurt the sentiments of the Muslim personnel in the armed forces and the state machine in general.
(b) It would push the Muslims of the East away from the Sinhalese and the Sri Lankan state, off the fence, into the arms of the Tamil nationalists, which would reawaken the slogan of the Tamil-speaking people and the demand for a single north-eastern political entity.
(c) It would open a new front against the State in the form of armed Muslim youth who seek to defend their homes, properties and families.
(d) It would open a third front against Sri Lanka in the external arena, with the Tamil diaspora, the West/international human rights movement/UN, and Tamil Nadu being joined by elements of the Islamic world.
The renewal of the militaristic profile of the Government’s northern rule with the reappointment of Gen. Chandrasiri, the failure to stop Aluthgama and the impunity enjoyed by those who incited the anti-Muslim violence, when taken together, weakens rather than strengthens the State’s hold on the Tamil and Muslim dominated north and east.
Is the SLMC today’s TULF?
We Sri Lankan citizens and most especially our armed forces paid a high price for 30 long years because the politicians, egged on by religious ideologues, messed with – and therefore messed up relations with – the Tamil minority. The Tamils are 80 million strong throughout the world. Now the successors of those religious ideologues and the successor politicians are messing with the Muslims.
There are a billion Muslims in the world. In many places some of them are killing each other as the Christians did in an earlier age in Europe, but in Sri Lanka there is no Sunni-Shia divide. Whatever militancy there may be among the Muslims of Sri Lanka is directed within their community and not against the Sinhalese. That could change.
Unlike communities which are ready to kill for their religion but have no tradition of martyrdom, the Muslims are ready to die for their religion, not just kill for it. Unlike the Tamils who were hardly a globally radicalised community, the Muslim world has been in militant ferment for decades. Weapons, training and above all, inspirational role models, are far more readily available than they were for the Tamils.
The anti-Tamil riots of 1958 produced the conditions which produced Prabhakaran, the LTTE, and the first generation Tamil Diaspora (especially in the UK). Do we know what Aluthgama and impunity for coercive Islamophobia may produce?
For decades, Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism in and out of government pushed the moderate Tamil nationalists of the Federal Party and the TULF around, thereby paving the way for and strengthening terrorism. Then it was the TULF, now it is the SLMC.
Today the mainstream Muslim politicians of the SLMC and even the SLFP itself are being vilified, as are moderate Muslim civic organisations. They are the best barrier within the Muslim community to the emergence of violent youth militancy. What will their weakening open the door to?
Incubating Islamic militancy
Contrary to Government propaganda and popular myth, the Tigers didn’t invent the suicide bombers. The Islamic Middle East did. The US Marine base in Lebanon was hit by a suicide truck, with over two hundred dead, and resulting in US withdrawal, five years before Capt. Miller hit the SLA after Vadamaarachchi.
If it took 30 years for Sri Lanka to overcome terrorism from a community that had a supportive rear of 80 million, at most, worldwide, how long will it take to overcome terrorism from a community that belongs to a larger community of a billion? Just do the math. Then add to that, the question of how we can hold out against highly motivated ‘jihadi’ martyrdom in a context in which we may be facing civic resistance from the Tamils in the North, shrinkage of our Western markets over ‘war crimes’ and calibrated concern from our giant neighbor over the situation of the Northern Tamils (ethnic kin of 70 million Indians in Tamil Nadu).
The Sri Lankan power elite treats ‘saffron terrorism’ such as in Grandpass and Aluthgama, as an indulgent parent does a spoilt child. By doing so, it encourages the radicalisation of Islamic youth, initially in self-defence. If as a result Sri Lanka’s Muslim youth become radicalised and reach out to or attract armed Islamic militancy from overseas, this country will become what it is not yet — an incubator and jumping off point for jihadism. Thus Sri Lanka will be perceived or misperceived by India and the USA, not only as an outpost of China in the Indian Ocean, but worse still, as a seedbed and springboard of Islamic militancy: in short, as a potential threat, and therefore a legitimate target. This will make it easier for the Tamil diaspora and Tamil Nadu to urge an Indo-US pincer move against Sri Lanka and the creation of Tamil Eelam as a counterweight to the lunacy in the island’s south.
(Dayan Jayatilleka was Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva from 2007-09, and until recently, Ambassador to France. He is the author of ‘Long War, Cold Peace: Conflict and Crisis in Sri Lanka,’ Vijitha Yapa Publishers, 2013.)
