Richard Koenigsberg: “The Proof of the Pudding is in the Dying”
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Samanth Subramanium, in New York Times, 2 July 2020, where the title reads “Two Wealthy Muslim Brothers became suicide Bombers, but Why?”
There’s a video of the exact moment Inshaf Ibrahim decided to abandon his life as a rich young man and turn into a mass murderer. In one sense, he had made up his mind weeks earlier, which was why he was loitering in the Cinnamon Grand hotel’s breakfast buffet on Easter Sunday last year in Colombo, strapped into a knapsack of explosives. Once he arrived, though, he appeared to dither. Later, investigators picked him out of CCTV footage, standing near a vacant table, wearing a baseball cap and a T-shirt, his back to the camera. In the footage, he moves like a perplexed penguin. Two steps forward, half a step back, a turn, another turn: a choreography of hesitation. Perhaps he is reconsidering? But no, the investigators concluded; he is waiting for more people to come in. Finally, a microsecond of stillness, arms heavy by his side; then his hands reach toward the front of his waist, and the film goes dark.
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Recent Thuppahi entries have highlighted the Workshop on “Sacrificial Devotion” held in Adelaide University in late 2005, one framed within the concept fashioned by Michael Roberts to study and comprehend suicidal commitments to political cause. Note the ITEM
Thilipan on Fast unto death in 1987
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Daya ….. Rohan…. Shyam…. Riaz ….. what a South Asian spread! …………………. a dinkie-die curry’
I = Michael Roberts: An Explanatory Preamble Cast in May 2020
By 2004 I had retired from teaching in the Anthropology Department at Adelaide University and was proceeding with the pursuit of my research interests at my own pace within my limited resources. Sri Lanka and my connections therein was one such resource. When researching in Colombo in late November 2004 I flew to Jaffna on a wing and a prayer[1] with the intention of exploring the Tamil Tiger “cult of suicide.” Previous contacts with two Tamil Canadians and a visit to the University of Jaffna as soon as I landed assisted me no end: partly via the invaluable support provided by the Krishnaswamy family[2] and the readiness of their medical student son Chenthan to become my aide and guide during peregrinations within the Peninsula.[3]
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ONE = Ellise Ann Allen: “Sri Lanka: One year after the Easter attacks,” Daily News, 23 April 2020, http://www.dailynews.lk/2020/04/23/features/217020/sri-lanka-one-year-after-easter-attacks
On the one-year anniversary of a series of Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka that killed nearly 300 people and injured 500 more, the nation mourned in silence, as the Government continues its investigation and families struggle to move forward.
To mark the anniversary of the April 21 attacks, the Sri Lankan government asked the entire nation to observe two minutes of silence at 8:45 a.m., the time the first bomb went off in St. Anthony’s Catholic Church in Colombo.
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Rodger Shanahan, in the Lowy Institute Website, mid-November 2019, = https://www.lowyinstitute.org/news-and-media/multimedia/audio/rodger-shanahan-australian-terrorists-views-world …. where the title is
In order to better understand what motivates Australian radical islamists to join or support a terrorist group it is first necessary to get a better understanding of who they are. This working paper examines data sets from 173 Australian citizens and residents to paint a picture of our own cohort of radical Islamist terrorists, including how likely they are to be rehabilitated. For the accompanying infographic feature accompanying this report, click here.
Since 2012 several hundred Australians have travelled to Syria and Iraq to undertake jihad with Islamic State, al-Qaeda or other radical Islamist groups.[1] Dozens more provided financial support to them or other jihadis, or planned, conducted or supported terrorist attacks in Australia on behalf of Islamic State.
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Kieren Shafritz De Zoysa’s Essay “Sri Lanka: My Cultural Connections” … submitted for the Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition … written just before he was among those killed by a Muslim bomber at the Cinnamon Grand Hotel on Easter Sunday 21/4/2019**
The tropical sun burns bright. On my way to school, red and black buses full of office workers, tuk-tuks of all colours, Porsches, Land Rovers, and BMWs crowd the roads. There are few road rules. I pass a speeding blur of white colonial buildings, ancient banyan trees, old elegant homes behind high walls, short ladies pushing trash carts, small kadeys selling cream crackers and sodas, and road-side hawkers offering freshly plucked red rambutans, golden yellow mangoes, young orange coconuts. Steel and glass office towers stand high over small houses. Cranes rise above expensive new apartment buildings. Occasionally I see a Buddhist monk in orange robes. Lonely, stray dogs roam the streets and sidewalks scavenging for food, near tourists who turn bright lobster red taking selfies in front of thousand-year-old temples.
David Kilcullen, in The Australian, 29 October 2019, where the title is “ISIS on a road to revenge after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s death”
The death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a symbolic blow to the organisation he led since April 2010. In practical terms, it may help the group regenerate as it adapts to the loss of its territorial “caliphate”. Baghdadi had been on the run since Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces captured his capital, the city of Raqqa in northern Syria, in October 2017. Islamic State’s last stronghold, near Baghouz on the Syrian-Iraqi border, fell to SDF fighters, coalition advisers and US and allied airstrikes in March this year. These losses followed the fall of Mosul in northern Iraq, the largest and most important city controlled by Islamic State, from which Baghdadi declared the “caliphate” in mid-2014.
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Jayantha Somasundaram, in Island, 10 October 2019, with this title “Sri Lanka Army At Seventy: Recalling The First Decade”
Under the terms of the Defence Agreement, signed in November 1947, between London and Colombo, a British officer, the Earl of Caithness was seconded, in 1948, as military advisor to the Government of Ceylon. During World War II, Brigadier James Roderick Sinclair, 19th Earl of Caithness CBE DSO, had led his regiment the Gordon Highlanders, through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and into Germany.
Earl of Caithness
Brigadier Caithness proposed to the Ceylon Government, that the soon-to-be formed Army consist of an infantry battalion, an artillery regiment, signal, supply, ordnance, electrical and mechanical, and medical units; a works services engineering detachment to maintain buildings, a military police section and a training depot. Such a modest military establishment would only require one per cent of total government expenditure, and its personnel would, initially be drawn from the Ceylon Defence Force (CDF), the volunteer Army that had existed since 1910.
Rajan Hoole
Our history of impunity, especially since the ascent to power of J.R. Jayewardene in 1977, brings us to the strange and largely un-mourned disappearance of the law. The Easter eruption, the evidence suggests, was a gamble the protagonists stumbled into in confronting the arithmetical realities of the coming presidential election. Their expectations appear to have gone awry. What transpired was in effect, a second attempt at disenfranchisement, this time of the Muslims. The Plantation Tamils were disenfranchised in 1949, as a follow up to the 1948 Citizenship Act.
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thuppahi
