The pervasive fear among the ethno-religious communities that make up Sri Lanka not to transcend one another, combined with the identification of national identity with the Buddhist variant "healing" and the Sinhalese language, are the hallmarks of the country's national consciousness.
This fear of the supremacy of one group over the others intensified after the end of colonialism, when the dividing lines of the three great identities crystallized: the Buddhist Sinhalese, the Hindu Tamils and the Muslims.
As he explains in the newspaper El País the historian K.M. de Silva, the fear of the Sinhalese could be explained by their position as a majority ethnic group, but which indelibly carries the complex of the persecuted ethnic minority over the centuries. Separated from the mainland of India by the Strait of Pulk, throughout its history Sri Lanka has been looted by successive invasions of Tamil Hindus from India and adorned the coats of arms of their dynasties with treasures from the dogs. Buddhist cities. Another identity of the Sigalez is the Buddhist religion, which when persecuted in India, found fertile ground inside Sri Lanka. Hence the national pride of its inhabitants as guardians of culture who were threatened by their powerful neighbor.
For its part, the Tamil Hindu minority, which hails from southern India and has settled in the northeast of the island for centuries, had, unlike the Sinhalese, the majority majority, convinced that it was in a privileged position as it shared the same culture with one billion of its fellow believers on the other side of the straits. The source of the conflict between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is the longest-running conflict in Asia and can be interpreted through this cultural difference. The Tamils became famous because they were the first to introduce the terrorist tactic of suicide attack, which has become so widespread in other contexts of conflict today. The death of their leader Velupilai Prabhakaran in 2009 marked the end of the conflict and the defeat of the separatist movement.
The response to this civil strife by successive governments has been to strengthen the Sinhalese religious conscience, relying on the extensive assistance of Buddhist religious authorities. President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his two brothers embodied the determination of these identity measures to the fullest, interpreting his triumph in the 2005 election as a white check to end the conflict once and for all. And indeed, he did so in an effective but disgusting way: thousands of civilians were slaughtered during the most relentless phase of the war.
The voices of the press and humanitarian organizations were silenced through the tactics of arrests and killings.
Peace has taken Sri Lanka out of the periscope of international events. Until 2014, tensions between Buddhists and Muslims sparked a series of uprisings, and over the past decade the relationship between the two religious communities has been marked by a radicalization of their positions. In recent years, the supranationalist religious organization Bodu Bala Senna has not emerged, promoting a policy of hatred against Muslims, the conduct of which in many ways resembles the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar.
The extremist group's extremist actions, according to terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna, have, of course, provoked an even more extreme reaction, with the predominance of the most extremist Muslim sects in the country's community, Salafism and Wahhabism. Two tendencies that are considered foreign within the community and are judged to alter the moderate tradition that characterizes the morals of the local Muslim society.
Demographic change has also contributed to the rise of the idea of the Muslim threat: since 1948 the demographic growth of Sinhalese has been 1,1%, while that of Muslims by 1,9%. But globalization has also contributed to exacerbating the problems of like-minded communities within the broader constellation of common traditions and institutions: thus extremist Buddhist tendencies identify with the oppressed Buddhist minority in Bangladesh and take extreme actions in their name. Similarly, Muslims include in their rhetoric the persecution of their brothers in Myanmar.
To date, the Christian community, which has been hit hardest by yesterday's attacks, has been left out of the panorama of community conflicts. In fact, Christians were widely regarded as a unifying force that unites the opposing tendencies of the Sinhalese and the Tamils. Nothing is clear yet, and only in the near future will one be able to say whether these events are linked to a regional enlargement of the recent attacks in New Zealand, or just another new episode in the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict.
- Source: APE-BPE / Giorgis-Vyron Davos.