Muslims make up around a tenth of the population in majority-Buddhist Sri Lanka. The island nation has been under the spotlight in recent years due to Colombo’s discriminatory policies.
The subcontinent has a long history of communal tensions and violence, from the bloody partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 to the violent 1971 war which led to the formation of Bangladesh. However, regional analysts say the latest incidents are indicative of the rising tide of religious intolerance against minorities in south Asia, evident across India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.
Racked by civil war for more than two decades, Sri Lanka rarely makes it to the top of policymakers’ action lists today. The conflict pitted Sinhalese against Tamils, with the predominately Sinhalese Sri Lankan government fighting the insurgent Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). But in addition to ethnic friction, religious divisions persist. Sri Lanka is majority Buddhist, with significant Hindu, Muslim, and Catholic and Protestant Christian populations.
The origins of Sri Lanka’s Muslim community can be traced back to the historic trading routes between South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Traders from the Middle East (Arabs and Persians) developed commercial interests in southern India in the seventh century, which also spread to Sri Lanka. These Middle Eastern merchants married Tamil and Sinhalese women and settled in the east of the island around Batticaloa and Ampara.
Muslims are widely distributed across Sri Lanka, with two-thirds living in the Sinhala Buddhist-majority region of Central, Southern and Western provinces, and the remaining one-third living in the Tamil-dominated coastal areas of north and east. Substantial Muslim communities live in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital. The Muslim political leadership comes from the Western province. The reason is simple. This province is home to the Muslim mercantile class and its educated elite, while the Eastern province is inhabited by Muslims who are primarily farmers, fishermen and, to some extent, small traders.
The state military were allegedly indiscriminate in their counter-assaults on LTTE-controlled areas, particularly during the last brutal assault in 2009. The human cost of this attack is still not fully known, with UN investigations undermined by state non-cooperation, but many thousands of Sri Lankans were killed, including many civilians. Sri Lankan Muslims were repeatedly caught in the middle of this conflict: Tamil-speaking, but not “Tamil” enough for the separatist homeland. Muslims were expelled from their homes in the LTTE-controlled north en masse in the 1990s, and in a disturbingly familiar account – LTTE forces allegedly massacred worshippers in mosques.
After the end of the civil war in 2009, an anti-Muslim movement initiated by the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), with the monk Galabod Aththe Gnanasara at the helm, began to emerge. The BBS is an activist group led by Buddhist monks which mobilised around what they described as the threat posed by the “social separatism” of “extremist Muslims”. Their definition of extremism, however, seems to encompass the majority of Muslims’ everyday practices.
Meanwhile, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was elected president in 2019, after promising a crackdown on “extremism” promulgated regulations allowing the detention of anyone suspected of causing “acts of violence or religious, racial or communal disharmony or feelings of ill will or hostility between different communities”.
Muslims and Christians bury the dead. But Sri Lanka’s mandatory cremation policy for those infected with COVID-19 has left minority communities feeling helpless and angry.
Earlier this year, U.N. human rights experts urged the Sri Lankan government to end its policy of forced cremation of Muslims who has died of coronavirus, saying it is contrary to Islamic and other minorities’ beliefs. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief Ahmed Shaheed; Fernand de Varennes, special rapporteur on minority issues; and Clement Nyaletsossi Voule, special rapporteur on rights of peaceful assembly, said the practice could foment existing prejudices, intolerance and violence.
In a new report published by Amnesty International titled, “From Burning Houses to Burning Bodies: Anti-Muslim Harassment, Discrimination and Violence in Sri Lanka” said, “while the forced cremation policy has been reversed after the government succumbed to international pressure ahead of a vote on Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Council, the authorities are still seeking to implement discriminatory legislation, including a niqab ban and a ban on madrasas. If adopted, these restrictions would violate the freedom from discrimination based on religion guaranteed and safeguarded by Sri Lanka’s Constitution, and international human rights law which Sri Lanka is bound by.”
Similarly, there are concerns over the arbitrary arrests of Muslim activists in the country, as well as delays or denials in providing bail.
It added that the authorities have used existing legislation to target Muslims, including the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), which permits suspects to be detained without charge for up to 90 days, and without being produced before a court. This is in addition to the misuse of the ICCPR Act, a law intended to prohibit the propagation of racial or religious hatred, amounting to incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.
However, most poor Muslim families send their children to Islamic schools because they cannot afford to enroll them in public schools, which fuels a vicious circle of marginalisation. In the capital Colombo alone, some around 5,000 children fail to be admitted in government schools each year. Rights activists say security threats can be met without making Muslims feel that the state is systematically targeting their culture. Sri Lanka should negotiate with Muslim elites and civil society leaders to identify meaningful solutions to fight extremism, rather than imposing a discriminatory ban and shutting down opportunities for education.
