THE numbers are currently relatively small but the significance of the crisis of Muslim refugees in Sri Lanka is considerable. In the wake of the April terrorist outrage in which 250 were butchered by a group of bigots linked to Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS) there was an immediate backlash against the country’s Muslim community, who make up around ten percent of the population.
Despite government appeals for calm, hardliners from the country’s Buddhist majority launched attacks of Muslim-owned businesses and properties. Mobs pressured Buddhist landlords to throw Muslim tenants out of their homes and places of work. Muslim workers were also fired, in contravention of the country’s employment laws. So far more than a thousand Muslims have become internal refugees. Some of them were foreigners, Afghans and Pakistanis who had fled violence in their own countries to find shelter with Sri Lanka Muslims. It is ironic that those same people who offered help and protection to other Muslims should now themselves be victims of discriminatory aggression.
The prime movers in this violence are Buddhist fundamentalists inspired by the evil Islamophobia of their coreligionists in Myanmar, who have acted with the connivance, if not the complete sanction of the flawed regime of Aung San Suu Kyi, the unworthy holder of the Nobel Peace prize. Ethnic cleansing which has advanced into genocide of the Muslim Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine province, has been widely condemned, not least by the United nations.
However, as yet there have been no warnings over the similar ignorant and bestial outbreaks in Sri Lanka, against another defenseless Muslim community. Apologists for the Sri Lankan authorities point out that the country has been brutalized by 28 years of civil war against the secessionist Tamil Tigers in the north. This is no argument. Indeed the opposite ought to be true. A society that has been exposed to such a long and terrible trauma ought to be more, not less sensitive to the possibility of fresh ruptures, or new violence.
Two hundred and fifty people perished in the awful attacks this spring by Muslim extremists. But among the very first to condemn this savage lunacy were imams and other prominent members of the country’s Muslim community. One made it clear that these terrible crimes brought shame upon all Sri Lankan Muslims. The anger and disgust they felt were demonstrated by their rapid response to police appeals for information. The terrorists were quickly identified and their hideout found. A great deal of that had to do with evidence provided by Sri Lankan Muslims.
Tragically, in the face of mindless bigotry hardly less appalling than that of the Daesh terrorists, that robust response of Muslim leaders is being ignored. President Maithripala Sirisena and his Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe have not been sufficiently forthright in their condemnation of the assault on Sri Lankan Muslims and those foreign Muslims who have sought refuge in Sri Lanka from persecution in their own countries. The wounds of almost 30 years of civil conflict will not heal as long as those in power are prepared to countenance the existence of inter-communal discrimination and the prejudice and violence that grows from it. This beautiful island must not forget the lessons from its recent past which were learned at the cost of so much blood and treasure.
