Amarnath Amarasingam

On April 21, 2019 Sri Lanka was rocked by a series of bombings targetting churches and luxury hotels. The attacks, carried out by a local Islamist group with Islamic State connections, targeted Christians marking the Easter holiday and Western tourists visiting the island country. Ultimately 259 people were killed in the blasts and 500 injured. In the wake of the attack news broke that Indian intelligence had warned its Sri Lankan counterparts about the pending attack, but the warnings were not heeded and no action was taken to head off the terrorists.

A year later, Amarnath Amarasingam – an assistant professor in the School of Religion at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada – helps us navigate what we’ve learned in the past year about Sri Lanka’s response to India’s warnings, what we know about the contours of terrorism and extremist ideology in Sri Lanka, and what impact the country’s new government (and past government dysfunction) has on its security.

Soon after the Easter Sunday bombings last year, there were various reports that Sri Lanka had received specific intelligence from India about the pending attacks. What have we learned in the year since about how the Sri Lankan government missed or failed to act on such warnings?

The day after the attack, several politicians in Sri Lanka admitted that there were precise warnings given by Indian intelligence several times in April 2019, which were ignored or failed to land on the right desk for action to be taken. The warnings, quite surprisingly, accurately named the attacker and the network that would eventually carry out the attack. In October 2019, the Sri Lankan parliamentary investigation laid blame on the former head of the intelligence service, Nilantha Jayawardena, who received information about plots in the country as early as April 4. The report from the investigation basically said that, despite several warnings, Jayawardena did not pass on the information of a potential plot to the military until April 19, two days before the attack. In early March, the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the Easter attacks submitted its second interim report to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, but details of the report not been made public as of this writing.

The attacks followed a major constitutional crisis in Sri Lanka that pitted the prime minister against the president. How big a role did the political dysfunction emerging from that crisis play in enabling the intelligence failures that allowed the attacks to take place?

In October 2018, President Maithripala Sirisena fired Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe and installed former President Mahinda Rajapaksa as the new prime minister. Wickremasinghe, for his part, refused to leave. The country then had two prime ministers, causing a full-blown constitutional crisis. The Supreme Court then moved to force Sirisena to reinstate Wickremasinghe. What’s relevant for the Easter attacks, however, is that the relationship between Sirisena and Wickremasinghe – in the realm of politics – spilled over into how they approached national security. The parliamentary investigation, which submitted its report in October 2019, also accused Sirisena of politicizing national security. The report noted that Sirisena on numerous occasions held “ad hoc national security council meetings” and left out “key individuals from meetings.” The consensus, for the most part, suggests that while Ranil and Mathripala did not like each other personally, they should have kept politics far away from national security issues, and that if everyone was on the same page and passing on information smoothly, the plot might have been foiled early.

How would you characterize the general contours of terrorism in Sri Lanka? Were the Easter attacks a one-time tragedy or the tip of a dangerous trend?

I would say, based on everything we know about the attackers, that this was a one-time tragedy – albeit one that could have been prevented. I say that because everyone I’ve spoken with in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka knew Zahran Hashim, the mastermind of the attacks, and knew that he was bad news. As I’ve written before, there were protests against him by members of the Muslim community as early as February 2017. Members of the Muslim community in the east had notified intelligence services in 2017 that Hashim was preaching hateful messages and was probably mobilizing toward violence. After the attack, it became clear that almost the entire network were his close associates or his direct family members. So, it seems to me that everyone associated with this network has died or been arrested. Radicalization in Sri Lanka, as far as I can tell, is not widespread and Zahran and his network are not a symptom of a larger trend in the country.

From when we first learned about the attack, it was clear that it wasn’t fully homegrown. For one, the choice of targets – churches and hotels – seemed much more in line with Islamic State attack targeting than local extremists. While the Christian community, particularly Evangelicals, have come under some harassment by radical Buddhists in the country, there is no history of major animosity between Muslims and Christians to warrant such an attack. It simply wasn’t part of the ethnic and religious fault lines, which have brought about violence in the past. So, it was clear from the beginning, especially after the numerous communiques released by the Islamic State through its official channels, that something else was going on.

Many Sri Lankan Muslims feared that the Easter attacks could lead to increased discrimination against their community on the pretext of tighter security. Have we seen these fears borne out?

Readers may remember that a few weeks after the Easter attacks, we saw large scale violence against the Muslim community in the country. Starting on May 6 and lasting 10 days, there were numerous instances of rioting, mobs of radical Sinhala-Buddhists attacking mosques and Muslim-owned businesses. According to some reports, a total of 500 Muslim shops, houses, and mosques were destroyed. While this kind of anti-Muslim violence has increased following the end of the civil war with the Tamil Tigers in 2009, the violence of May 2019 was particularly violent and targeted several innocent Muslims as well. To make matters worse, many Muslims felt they couldn’t speak out against the violence, because “one of their own” had just killed hundreds of people in churches and hotels throughout the country.

Some of the more heartbreaking episodes of anti-Muslim animus following the attacks never really made the news in a big way. It was small things like Tamil and Sinhala families taking their children out of school because the teacher, who had taught their children for years, was a Muslim. The attacks, in this way, really served to polarize communities and neighborhoods which had lived together in harmony for decades. It will likely take many years to fully heal these fissures.

Relatedly, the anti-Muslim animus hasn’t always spilled over into violence. To this day, there are periodic surges of conspiracies and misinformation on social media which target the Muslim community: rumors that the community is secretly plotting to install Islamic Law in the country or that there is a secret plot in the country to sterilize Sinhalese women so Muslims can radically re-engineer the demographic makeup of the island. This latter issue culminated in May 2019 when Dr. Mohamed Shafi’s life was turned upside down for almost a year after he was accused of sterilizing thousands of women.

In November, Sri Lanka elected a new president and a new government – though filled with familiar faces – is in charge now. Has the new government enacted any new policies specifically in the counterterrorism realm?

Nothing yet, but according to the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), a few initiatives are in the pipeline. What is true is that the Easter attacks and national security were major election platform items for the current president, who, as some may remember, was pivotal for increasing the overall militarization of the country following the end of the civil war against the Tamil Tigers in 2009. As CPA noted, post-election Sri Lanka has “witnessed the expansion of a powerful Ministry of Defence with an unprecedented number of former military officials receiving promotions and appointments to key positions in government, despite some facing allegations of past abuses.” Late last year, there was discussion that Cabinet had approved the National Intelligence Act, which was to empower intelligence agencies in the country, and the finalization of the Cyber Security Bill. There might be more in the works, but they have not made it public yet.