Black Easter’s aftermath: dark ‘narratives’

ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE: Many players strut and fret their petty hour on the country’s national stage. While a people torn between peace and justice act with restraint more often than not under constraints whose shackles they thought had been cast off for almost a decade next month

As heads roll (or not, in a prime case), and political ambition among other ignoble motives sees state responses to last Sunday’s carnage descend from the supercilious to the surreal, many questions remain in the minds of Sri Lanka’s average citizens. 

Among these is the simple but subversive query: “Cui bono?” (‘Who benefits?’). While speculation ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, it behoves us as islanders in a once again riven nation to piece together the puzzle – in the same breath as we struggle to start living together in peace once more. I pen these ‘narratives’ after a weeklong rumination:

 

First blush

In the immediate aftermath of the first explosions, the usual suspects came unbidden to heart and mind. The critical context for the finger of suspicion to point at politically-motivated thugs had been set and enacted a Sunday prior to Easter. That was when a gang led by regional organisers of the SLPP had taken a Methodist leader hostage and stoned a Christian worship centre in Anuradhapura. So it was natural to wonder if even these bombings – unnatural for Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism – were part of some new modus operandi of ‘pohottuwa’-stamped goons. 

 

Second thoughts

There was a critical difference between the Palm Sunday attacks and the Easter Sunday bombings, though. The former, for all its myopic virulence, was focused on a singular religious demographic in a particular township: Anuradhapura. In a sense, it was an irritated host body trying to forcibly evict what it perceived to be a parasitic intrusion into its home territory. The latter, with a broader scope and less clarity of its vision for outsiders caught up in the violent maelstrom, was designed to create wider panic in Colombo, Negombo, Batticaloa – and beyond. 

It seemed able to achieve its vile ends through means not really justiciable in a court of law, or through the agency of good sense or common decency. You can stop a gang with some effort; but to stay the hand of a suicide bomber is well-nigh impossible. That national interpreters – if not quite international investigators yet – would link local nationalism with global terrorism was not on the horizon then. Now it is. And more is the pity… it is a twin helix of evils that our erstwhile paradise could do well without. 

 

Strike three

Into this volatile milieu came the first whiff of global grapeshot. In bits and pieces, Intelligence – ironically, including past ‘intel’ shared with state actors but not made avail of – fingered (if not quite as yet collared) a deadly breed of extremist terrorists. Pixel by pixel and in often heart-stopping footage, the perpetrators were profiled – police faux pas as to the identity of some of them notwithstanding. 

State agencies as much as governmental actors from Premier to State Defence Minister bought into the internationalist narrative. To wit, that these bombings were carried out by jihadist cells albeit tenuously linked with a Middle Eastern terrorist group with ambitions to establish a modern worldwide caliphate. 

Of course, questions lingered. Who were these Salafists such that their neighbours would not question their activities? (It transpired, they did.) Why was Wahhabism tolerated in the fertile sowing fields of the east? (It may eventuate that past regimes played one form of militancy against another, for whatever reason they might still trot out.) How is it possible that terror cells evidently up to a decade in the making escaped the attention of a much more beefed up defence establishment as existed in the past? Where did the suicide bombers get their raw material from? Whose protection could they be under such that they were not detected and arrested; or noted, but not detained; or questioned, only to be later released?    

 

Four horsemen

Perhaps sensing that he was on the cusp of history – or its dustbin – the President was quick to link the attacks to his recent crusade against the drug mafia. However vehemently he denied it on national television though, critics (and there are an increasing number of these since his failed coup of last year) would be forgiven for seeing in our head of state’s happy concatenation, of his activity and the violent activism of a single day, the signature of an ongoing presidential campaign. Therefore, and despite parts of his proclamations seeming to make at least some sense, one must interrogate his narrative with the hermeneutic of suspicion.

Why did he alienate his Prime Minister and State Defence Minister from the vital National Security Council? Where was his care and concern in the first blush of their honeymoon, when he alleges that his coalition partners undermined the country’s intelligence apparatus? When he was a very senior minister under a previous dispensation, how instrumental was he in combating the hydra-headed serpents of 1) armed nationalisms and 2) narcotic armies? Or are his enemies only 3) democracy and 4) republicanism these days?   

 

Fifth column

A more disturbing strand in this tangled web is the role ostensibly played by India in all of this. The tentacles of Big Brother’s octopus-like stranglehold can sometimes feel like unwelcome touching and stroking. These range from their incumbent and would-be Premier’s call to arms against alien intrusions in the region, to the sharing of intelligence that attacks against Sri Lankan soft targets was impending. 

That the teardrop isle fumbled the ball and failed to pass it on – in time – is on our bureaucratic apparatus and bumbling political establishment. But the latest revelations that the leader of the suicide bombers’ cabal spent a “substantial” amount of time in an Indian training camp must give us pause. And it would not be the first time that our neighbour to the north behaved as if its left hand did not know what its right hand was doing. For in an election year, when much more is at stake than the peace and security of its stable sister to the south, such revelations – and the not insignificant timing of their sharing – have turned out to be apocalyptic.     

 

Sixth sense 

A conundrum about the role of the world’s dominant power also exists. On the one hand, our government has played straight into the hands of hyena-like nationalist chauvinists snapping at the US’s heels by appropriating forensic and investigative help from America. On the other, the planet’s first nation’s official emissary is at odds with our government spokesmen as regards the sharing of intelligence between the two countries. For while Minister Dr. Harsha de Silva claimed that valuable and timely information about the attacks came from Stateside, Ambassador Alaina Teplitz has categorically refuted such an allegation. Thus, as far as American aid and assistance goes, we’re at sixes and sevens between the ‘original’ and ‘official’ versions of the same story. 

Therefore, as always, those with Sri Lanka’s true national interest at heart would do well to welcome the instrumentality of ‘federal bureaux of investigation’ on the surface while keeping a wary eye – as far as it makes sense to keep tabs on an underground movement – on the agenda of any ‘central intelligence agencies’. Regrettably, superpowers in this fractured global milieu play on both sides of national and international divides – more so in regions where their hegemony or that of their allies is under threat from rising socio-economic and political blocs. It is a narrative in which our island’s strategic location along a critical sea route and atop a maritime basin is increasingly a major chapter.

 

Seventh heaven

Which reminds me. A recent returnee from the land of the brave and the home of the free has thrown his hat in the ring for our forthcoming presidential contest (I almost wrote, ‘challenge’.) That he has chosen a moment at which our country is at a fearful crossroads speaks volumes for the values that the former strongman-bureaucrat will bring to his campaign (I almost said, ‘crusade’.) The timing smacks of opportunism, and even orchestration for the more suspicious thinkers among us! 

And in the irony of a moment in which many of the most unlikely citizens from the least expected demographics are hailing his timely – or is that simply well-timed? – declaration of intent, we must not forget the question marks that still hang over his erstwhile career; leave alone an expectant candidacy.

However salvific his present appearance and disposition may be, as a nation state and country that has come through – hardly unscathed – by over three decades of often artificially engineered conflict – we must not fail to ask the pertinent questions and probe in the most querulous manner a man, and a machine, and a movement, that has not always been inimical to the national interest. 

For instance, to ask: How is it that then burgeoning militant Islamic fundamentalism went undetected let alone defused under the previous regime of which he was a stalwart? What purpose could or did it serve prior dispensations to cultivate and critically engage discrete or complementary extremisms? Where was the long strong arm of the law then – and now too – against politically sensitive minorities and powerfully protected partners in both state and governmental circles?

 

Eighth day 

A day after the so-called ‘intelligence fiasco’ had left Mother Lanka in ruins her chief sons in charge of national security could or should have resigned. Instead, it has taken its second citizen six long days to even apologize – after innumerable national and international interviews in which he has come across more as Chief Inspector Closeau than a technocratic prime minister. If that isn’t bad enough, the Sri Lankan equivalent of Closeau’s nemesis – the long-suffering Chief Superintendent of our present misery – has blithely ordered resignations while stubbornly refusing to be purged himself. 

Adding an element of ugly to the equation is a former president who ‘won the war’ with political will but has demoted himself to an unflushable Opposition Leader taking opportunistic potshots at the powers that be – if only to orchestrate his brother’s triumphal re-entry into governance through politics.

And while national leaders play at government by gazette and political suicide through granting interviews when they’d do better to shut up, it’s left to the saner stamp of folks in religious mufti to encourage Sri Lankans to pick up the pieces, move on and face the future with uncertainty yet courage and solidarity. This is our brave new world that has such wonders in it.

(Journalist | Editor-at-large of LMD | Writer #SpeakingTruthToPower)