Muditha Dias of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2 June 2019, where the title is “The search for religious harmony in Sri Lanka after the Easter Sunday attacks”
“Who exactly is the NTJ?” I asked our cameraman. We were filming at the Temple of the Tooth Relic, or the Dalada Maligawa, the holiest Buddhist temple in Kandy, Sri Lanka.
It was December last year, and news had just come in that a little-known group, the National Thowheeth Jama’ath, had vandalised some small Buddha statues a few miles away. Our Sri Lankan cameraman told me they were an Islamist militant group that had sprung up in response to the intermittent Buddhist-Muslim skirmishes of the past two years.
The Sri Lankan public, it seemed, were largely unaware of this group until this incident. However, this news did not come as a surprise to me. I’m a producer with the Religion and Ethics Report on RN and part of the reason I was in Sri Lanka was to investigate the fallout from religious tensions, especially after attacks on Muslims in Kandy in March 2018.
I focussed the filming around Buddhism — the predominant religion in this country of 22 million people — and followed a Sri Lankan-Australian family, Namali, Bandula and Tiara De Silva, who were visiting the Maligawa during their holidays. They told me about the peaceful and harmonious faith they grew up with, and how they’d passed it on to their children since moving to Australia.
I returned to Sydney but my story plan had to change when on Easter Sunday this year, Muslim extremists targeted Christian worshippers and holidaymakers, killing 258 people and injuring more than 500.
People in Sri Lanka were blindsided by these attacks. Despite my connection to Sri Lanka and awareness of socio-political tensions, I couldn’t figure out how a tiny organisation like the NTJ, which was vandalising Buddhist statues in the country, had managed to execute meticulously planned suicide attacks on Christian churches and luxury hotels.
But it came to light that intelligence authorities were aware of about three dozen Muslim Sri Lankans, members of the NTJ, who had done a stint with Islamic State in the Middle East. Like other groups in Sri Lanka, the NTJ were quietly arming themselves in preparation for the imminent next round of Buddhist-Muslim clashes.
But according to experts, like political analyst Rohan Gunaratne, members of the depleted IS knew of the NTJ’s possession of explosive material and persuaded them to unleash their lethal resources on “Western” symbols. And this is why Christian churches and hotels full of foreigners suddenly became a target.
Since Easter Sunday, I have spoken to many Sri Lankans of different faiths, from all walks of life, and they feel that the nation is capable of shrugging off this latest tragedy and moving forward. After all, Sri Lankans are a resilient people. More than 60,000 died during the ethnic conflict which devastated the country from 1983 to 2009. On Boxing Day in 2004, Sri Lanka faced another disaster: the eastern coast was struck by a tsunami which killed 30,000 people.
Throughout these tragedies, Catholicism was a bridging faith because its worshippers included both Tamils and Sinhalese. The Easter Sunday attacks cannot change this. Sri Lankans have come back stronger from each painful experience of inter-communal violence and natural disaster. They will raise their head again. Their fervent hope is that global forces of religious fundamentalism will leave them alone to sort out their differences.
My Compass story is about that hope for religious harmony in Sri Lanka.
Hoping for Harmony went on air on Compass on ABC TV at 6:30pm on June 23 and on iview.
ALSO NOTE
Ameer Ali, ACL 1981 “The 1915 racial riots in Ceylon (Sri Lanka): a reappraisal of their causes,” South Asia, n. s. 4: 1-20.
Ameer Ali, ACL 2009a “The Transformation of Muslim Politics in Sri Lanka and the Growth of Wahhabism from the 1980s,” 5 May 2009, https://thuppahis.com/2019/05/05/the-transformation-of-muslim-politics-in-sri-lanka-and-the-growth-of-wahhabism-from-the-1980s/
Ameer Ali, ACL 2019b “How Extremisms have fed off Each Other in Sri Lanka, 1950s-to-2019 … and still proceeding,” 6 May 2019, https://thuppahis.com/2019/05/06/how-extremisms-have-fed-off-each-other-in-sri-lanka-1950s-to-2019-and-still-proceeding/
Chakravarti, Uma & Haksar, Nandita 1987 The Delhi riots, Delhi: Lancer International.
Cook, David 2006 Understanding Jihad, University of California Press.
Cook, David 2015 ‘Jihad’, ‘Martyrdom Operations’, and Mohammed Atta’s Injunction in the “last Night’, before 9/11,” 12 May 2015, https://thuppahis.com/2015/05/12/jihad-martyrdom-operations-and-mohammed-attas-injunctions-in-the-last-night-before-911/
Engineer, Ashgar Ali (ed).1987 Ethnic conflict in South Asia, Delhi: Ajanta Publications.
Farasat, Warisha 2013 “The Forgotten Carnage of Bhagalpur,” Economic & Political Weekly 48/3, http://www.epw.in/journal/2013/03/insight/forgotten-carnage-bhagalpur.html
Jayasuriya, Wilfrid 2019 “The Force of the Moors: Reflections Historical and Ethnographic,” 25 June 2019, https://thuppahis.com/2019/06/25/the-force-of-the-moors-reflections-historical-and-ethnographic/
Kannangara, A.P. 1984 “The riots of 1915 in Sri Lanka: a study of the roots of communal violence,” Past & Present,102: 130-65.
MA Nuhman: Sri Lankan Muslims: Ethnic Identity within Cultural Diversity, Colombo, ICES, 2007
Roberts, Michael (ed.) 1979 Collective Identities, Nationalisms and Protest in Sri Lanka during the Modern Era, Colombo: Marga Publications.
Roberts, Michael 1979 “Meanderings in the Pathways of Collective Identity and Nationalism”, in M. Roberts (ed.) Collective Identities, Nationalisms and Protest in Modern Sri Lanka, Colombo: Marga Publications, pp. 1-90.
Roberts, Michael 1979d”Problems of Collective Identity in a Multi-Ethnic Society: Sectional Nationalism vs Ceylonese Nationalism, 1900-1940″, in Collective Identities, Nationalisms and Protest in Modern Sri Lanka, Colombo: Marga Publications, pp. 337-60.
Roberts, Michael 1994a “The imperialism of silence under the British raj: arresting the drum,” in Roberts, Exploring confrontation. Sri Lanka: politics, culture and history, Reading: Harwood Academic Publishers, pp.149-81.
Roberts, Michael 1994b “Mentalities, ideologues, assailants, historians and the pogrom against the Moors in 1915,” in Roberts, Exploring confrontation. Sri Lanka: politics, culture and history, Reading: Harwood Academic Publishers, pp.149-81.
Roberts, Michael 2007 “Suicide Missions as Witnessing: Expansions, Contrasts,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, vol 30: 857-88.
Roberts, Michael 1996 “Teaching lessons, removing evil: strands of moral puritanism in Sinhala nationalist practice,” South Asia, Special Issue, XIX: 205-20.
Roberts, Michael 2009 “Marakkala kolahalaya: Mentalities directing the Pogrom of 1915,” in Roberts, Confrontations in Sri Lanka, Colombo, Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2009, pp. 113-154.
Roberts, Michael 2019 “Slippages: Where ‘Muslim’ is An Ethnic Label as well as a Religious Typification,” 3 May 2018, https://thuppahis.com/2019/05/03/slippages-where-muslim-is-an-ethnic-label-as-well-as-a-religious-typification/
Roberts, Michael: 2019 “The Clash of Civilisations and Hate at the Heart of 21/4 in Sri Lanka,”14 May 2019, https://thuppahis.com/2019/05/14/the-clash-of-civilisations-and-hate-at-the-heart-of-21-4-in-sri-lanka/#more-35621
MAM Shukri: Muslims of Sri Lanka, Beruwela, 1986
Thuppahi Item: 2019 “The Death Toll in Sri Lanka: Ethnicity,” 4 May 2019, https://thuppahis.com/2019/05/04/the-death-toll-in-sri-lanka-ethnicity/
PLUS
“Missing the Boat. How Religio-Political Divisions have Deepened,” May 9, 2019 , ….A Letter from Rohan De Soysa in Colombo to Michael Roberts in Adelaide, 9th May 2019 ….. https://thuppahis.com/2019/05/09/missing-the-boat-how-religio-political-divisions-have-deepened/ ….
