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Sri Lanka's explosive Muslim
factor
By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - A wave of tension is sweeping
through Sri Lanka's Eastern Province following the
killing last month of around five Muslims, allegedly by
the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In this
atmosphere of mounting uncertainty, Muslim extremism
appears to be gathering momentum in the eastern parts of
the island.
According to media reports,
hardliners within the Muslim community are winning
support for the idea that Muslims must take up arms to
protect themselves from attacks by LTTE militants. Some
reports suggest that they have established links with
Islamic militants overseas.
The Associated Press
(AP) cites a Sri Lankan police intelligence report that
says that Islamic extremists have already set up two
training bases. While serious weapons training at the
bases is yet to begin, the intelligence report says that
the emphasis now is on raising the level of anger among
Muslims to prepare them for a jihad.
The AP
report admits, though, that "no one in the rice-growing
area [in eastern Sri Lanka] acknowledged the [existence
of] the bases". The report, however, observes out that
"many people looked away" when asked about the weapons
training bases.
From the mid-1980s onwards,
there have been occasional reports of Muslims receiving
funds and arms from sources in the Middle East. If the
present reports of mounting Islamic extremism are true,
it signals a worrying complication in the Sri Lankan
conflict.
Sri Lankan society is multi-ethnic,
multi-lingual and multi-religious. The Sinhalese are an
overwhelming majority, and most of them are Buddhist.
Tamils constitute the largest minority, and while most
of them are Hindu, there are many Tamil Christians as
well. Unlike the Buddhists, Christians or Hindus on the
island, whose identity stems from the language that they
speak, religion determines the identity of Sri Lankan
Muslims. The Muslims speak Tamil in Tamil-dominated
areas, and Sinhalese on the rest of the island.
Thus, while the conflict in Sri Lanka is
generally perceived as one between the Sinhalese and
Tamils, the Muslims are significant actors in the civil
war that has claimed thousands of lives over the past
decades.
It is in the island's Eastern Province
that interaction between the Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim
populations has been most explosive. Once a
Tamil-dominated area, the province's demographic
composition has changed drastically, with the government
settling Sinhalese there. Today, while the Trincomalee
district - the northernmost of the three Eastern
Province districts - has a large section of Sinhalese,
Batticaloa is predominantly Tamil, while Amparai is
mainly Muslim.
The killing of Muslims has put
the deadlocked peace process between the Colombo
government and the LTTE under further strain as the LTTE
has been blamed for the killings.
However, so
counterproductive is the killing of Muslims to the LTTE
cause that doubts have been raised as to whether the
Tigers were in fact behind the killings. The LTTE is
currently trying to secure an interim northeast regional
administration. "Alienation of Muslims, who may
constitute the largest single community in the east [the
LTTE did not permit the last census of 2001 to be
carried out in the region] can be a fatal blow to its
viability," points out Jehan Perera, a Sri Lankan
analyst.
"A Muslim refusal to agree to an
LTTE-dominated interim administration for the northeast
would make it difficult for the government to deliver
such an administration to the LTTE. If there is a
groundswell of opposition to the interim arrangements
from the Muslim community, the Muslim MPs in parliament
will be unable to acquiesce in it. This would also raise
the possibility of a crossover of Muslim MPs into the
ranks of the opposition, if the government goes ahead
with the interim administration, regardless of Muslim
opposition."
The Sri Lanka Muslim Congress
(SLMC) holds 12 seats in the 225-member parliament. It
is a coalition partner in Prime Minister Ranil
Wickremesinghe's government, which has only a slender
majority. The government could fall if the SLMC withdrew
its support.
What makes the alleged anti-Muslim
violence by the LTTE hard to understand is that in
recent years it has been trying to mend fences with
Muslims, returning land confiscated from them over the
past decade.
So, how does one then explain the
killings?
A look at the LTTE's approach to the
Muslims shows considerable flip-flops through the 1980s
and 1990s. In fact, if one goes back further, the
approach of Tamil moderate-nationalists towards the
Muslims was marked by a similar confusion.
Tamil
politicians recognized the importance of winning the
support of the Tamil-speaking Muslims in the east. Since
Tamil nationalism was a linguistic one, they sought to
include Muslims, and took steps to build linguistic
solidarity. To this end, the Tamil nationalist movement
avoided making religious appeals. And yet, in harking
back to a Dravidian past with symbols and legends that
the Muslims could not identify, the Muslims ended up
feeling excluded from the Tamil nationalist movement.
With the rise of Tamil militancy, Muslims
distanced themselves further from the Tamil Eelam cause.
The idea of being a minority in a Tamil-dominated state,
especially one dominated by the LTTE, did not appeal to
them.
Deep suspicion of each other's intentions
has marked Tamil-Muslim interaction for many decades.
Muslims accuse Tamils of "collaborating" with the
Sinhalese in the anti-Muslim violence of 1915. Tamils
doubt the loyalty of Tamil-speaking Muslims. They
believe that Muslims, even the Tamil-speaking ones, have
not voted for Tamil parties, choosing instead to vote
for Sinhalese parties, bargaining their support and
votes to win concessions from the Sinhalese parties.
The role of the Sri Lankan government in
deepening Tamil-Muslim rivalry has been significant.
Throughout the 1980s, for instance, much of the violence
unleashed on Tamils and Muslims was the work of the
government. A special task force is said to have played
a huge role in inciting Tamil-Muslim communal violence.
The LTTE did not trust the Muslims, many of whom were
providing information to the armed forces. It hit out
against the "traitors". The government armed the
Muslims, who in turn trained their guns on unarmed
Tamils in the East.
In 1990, the LTTE drove out
about 65,000 Muslims from the north. Muslims were
massacred in the east as well. Having failed to win the
support of the Muslims, it was said, the LTTE decided to
evict them from the north. Noted columnist "Taraki"
wrote in an article published in The Island in the early
1990s, suggesting that the LTTE's post-1990 anti-Muslim
policy was a response to demands from its Eastern cadres
that the organization must respond to the fears and
requests of the Eastern Tamils that the Muslims be
taught a lesson.
As in the 1990s, so also today,
the LTTE's hostile policy towards Muslims seems to make
little sense. The Tigers need Muslim support to achieve
their goals and they are an important part of its
logistics network. If the killings were indeed the work
of the LTTE, it is likely that it is convinced that
however much it may work to appease the Muslims to win
their support, they are unlikely to throw in their lot
behind the Tigers. Hence, the reversion to violence
against the Muslims.
Perera says that the
killing of Muslims lies is part of the LTTE's twin-track
policy. "The political track is currently epitomized by
the deliberations in Paris regarding a response to the
government's proposed interim administration for the
northeast. Tamil intellectuals from Sri Lanka and abroad
are attending these deliberations. These deliberations
are expected to yield a demand from the LTTE that would
ensure virtually total political control over the
northeast. The military track, however, operates on a
parallel, and is not subordinate to political
imperatives. The intimidation and coercion of the
Muslims is part of the LTTE's strategy to physically
dominate the northeast."
The LTTE's approach to
Muslims is similar to the Sri Lankan state's exclusion
of Tamils. The Sri Lankan state changed the demographic
composition of the east by settling Sinhalese in Tamil
lands and by unleashing violence against Tamils living
there to evict them. Now the LTTE appears to be doing
the same vis-a-vis the Muslims.
Of course, it is
possible that the recent killings were not the work of
the LTTE. Sections in Sri Lanka who are opposed to the
peace process and see in the fragile Tamil-Muslim
relations opportunity to trigger a cycle of violence and
counter-violence could, for instance, have carried it
out. Some Sri Lankans have even pointed an accusing
finger at "international forces opposed to the peace
process".
It is also possible that a section
among the Muslims engineered the killings. The
possibility that extremist sections among the Muslims
might have carried out the killings cannot be ruled out.
After all, ratcheting up a feeling of insecurity among
the Muslims would increase support for Islamic
militancy.
The violence against the Muslims, the
mounting communal tension in the east and the growing
Muslim extremism all draw attention to the relative
neglect of the "Muslim problem" in the peace process.
The conflict in Sri Lanka cannot be resolved by
appeasing the Tigers alone, and peace cannot come to the
island unless the grievances of all the minorities are
addressed.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co,
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