April 21, 2020 marked one year since the Easter Bombings by suicidal Islamic terrorists in Sri Lanka’s major cities of Batticaloa, Negombo, and its capital Colombo left over two hundred and fifty men, women, and children in attendance at the Catholic churches of St. Anthony’s Shrine and St. Sebastian’s, the evangelical Zion Church, and three hotels dead (Crux). The death toll included Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. Most of the deceased were Roman Catholic. During the homily of this year’s Easter Sunday, one free of violence though under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Archbishop of Colombo, Cardinal Malcom Ranjith, compassionately and shrewdly named the perpetrators, nine members of the ISIS admiring Islamic preacher Zahran Hashim’s National Thowheed Jamaath (NTJ), as “misguided youths." In short, he expressed his belief that the terrorist group involved did not represent the principles of the nation’s Islamic minority. Setting an example to the greater Sri Lankan society, one shaped by terrible ethnic-religious conflict, Cardinal Ranjith extended a much-needed olive branch. The lingering ethnic and religious tensions between the Tamil and Sinhalese ethnicities and memories of the Sri Lankan Civil War as recently as a decade earlier in 2009 had created the atmosphere conducive to a disillusioned few turning to extremism.
During the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries of the modern era, Muslims experienced extreme violence and various degrees of harassment from both the Tamil and the Sinhalese. Most excruciatingly, during the civil war lasting from the early 1980s to 2009 between the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sinhalese Sri Lankan government, the LTTE murdered two hundred and sixty-two Muslims and forced approximately seventy-five thousand to emigrate from Sri Lanka’s northern regions in two attacks on mosques. Years later, the government itself failed to act, a tacit form of approval, against the vandalization of mosques and destruction of property by Buddhist terrorists during the early 2010s. Most recently, on that bloody 2019 Easter Sunday, such negligence of minority security was similarly repeated by the malfeasant Sri Lankan intelligence services and political leaders of the highest authority who received alerts from India and the United States of potential attacks upon churches on Easter. Neither acted against nor even warned the Church of these threats due to the atmosphere of mutual mistrust among members of the bureaucracy, one ultimately favoring the Sinhalese-Buddhist majority.
Consequently, the sense of helplessness among some Muslims led to a search for a means to assert themselves against domination. An acquaintance of one of the bombers from the town of Mawanella remarked “We all felt the same rage” at the trend of humiliating treatment and the sense of helplessness. He implied that the primary difference between the bomber and himself was that the bomber had expressed his resentment “emotionally” with violence. Another shared his belief that “The feeling of injustice” had been a motivation. Zahran and his terrorist society, paired with the conspiratorial transnational allure of connections with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), in their eyes an effective scourge against non-Muslim powers and a source of religious and national unity, offered a promising outlet for the enraged to spend their anger through self-destruction. After the attacks, the late-Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi claimed responsibility for the Easter Bombings. However, Zahran’s group appears to have been inspired rather than directed by ISIS, albeit with one of its members in direct contact with ISIS in India to receive training.
Today’s Sri Lankan population of twenty-one million people is majority Sinhalese Buddhist (70%) with Tamil Hindu (12%), Muslim (10%), and Christian (7%, majority Roman Catholic) minorities. A major question in Western media immediately following the horrific events revolved around the question of why had Sri Lanka’s small Christian minority been targeted in the nation’s first manifestation of international Jihadi terrorism. Christians too experience their own share of persecution and pressure especially against evangelizing by the Buddhist majority in power as a result of Christians' lingering historical association with their privileged position under Portuguese and British colonial governance in the past. On the other hand, Christians had participated on both sides of the civil war. Additionally, Christians and Muslims did not share a major history of violence in Sri Lanka before the bombings. Perhaps, the motivation for the terror of Zahran’s NTJ was a foreign import by means of the internet of ISIS’s anti-Christian and anti-Western vitriol. For example, before the beheading of twenty-one Coptic Christians in 2015, the masked leader of the murderers praised the utility of fostering a “majesty of terror” over Western diplomats, allegedly the modern day crusaders of the spirit of Roman Christianity. ISIS believes Christians are historically one of Islam’s major enemies. It is very plausible that the online radicalization of a small segment of Sri Lankan Muslims led to a conclusion that the source of their treatment, religious and political, lay in the Christian churches.