Geopolitics Of The Easter Attacks: The Weaponization Of Religion Amid Hybrid War (In The IOR) – Part – II

By Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake –APRIL 6, 2021

Dr. Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake

Two years later: “Curiouser and Curiouser” cried Alice in Wonderland

Two year later, protestors were calling on the Sri Lanka Government (GoSL), to reveal the local-global networks that had funded, trained and designed the Easter 2019 crime and the foreign hands, funds and masterminds behind the leader and local group that staged the ISIS claimed attacks. Those attacks had clearly been carefully planned for some time and with bi-partisan local political patronage, even as national investigation institutions, such as the CID, TID and NSI had been debilitated and captured by interested external parties that rushed to Colombo to investigate the crime.

More than 10 foreign intelligence agencies including the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Britain’s MI6,  France’s Interpol, Austrian intelligence agency, Israel’s Mossad, India’s  Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and IB, Pakistan’s ISI, Chinese intel, and Russia’s KGB were involved in the investigation.

There is reliable information that the CIA had removed the cell phones of the suicide bombers purportedly to track and trace contact networks.

The Saudi Embassy in Colombo received advanced notice of the crime from Riyadh but did not share this information with Colombo authorities, unlike the Indian Intelligence agencies that had delivered several advanced warnings to Sri Lankan intelligence agencies that however failed to act upon it.

At the Presidential Commission of inquiry it was revealed that the Terrorism Investigation Department (TID) and Criminal Investigation Department (CID) had been instructed not to take action against Zahran’s network by the Prime Minister and the President because of repercussions from the diplomatic community despite early warnings about the network!

The Federation of Kattankudy Mosques and Institutions had accused Hizbullah of encouraging the Arabization of Sri Lankan Muslims when its representative testified before the Parliament Select Committee (PSC) appointed to probe Easter Sunday attack. ISIS had links to the UAE, Turkish and Saudi establishment, that funded the National Thowheed Jamaat (NTJ), and senior politicians in the Yahapalanay regime at the time, particularly, M.L.M Hizbullah and Rishard Bathudeen, of course the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress and Rauf Hakeem, indeed arguably all Muslim politicians who went on Haj during the Sirisena’s sacking of Ranil WIckremesinghe.

It was also revealed that M.L.M Hizbullah and Bathudeen from the East and West Coasts of Sri Lanka, who was with both the Rajapakse and Yahapalanya regime had got copious funds from Saudi Arabia also to set up a Shria University and was known to have had financial dealings with the leader of the Suicide bombers, Zahran Hashim also from Kathankudi.

Thus two years later intent on non-recurrence of such violence in Colombo and across the country, special prayer and silent protests took place at the end of service by worshippers dressed in black supported by the island’s powerful Buddhist clergy declaring their support for the call by Archbishop Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith for truth and justice for the victims of the deadly attacks.

Geopolitics and the weaponization of Religion/s

Ethnic and religious identity politics in the island has rarely been exclusively internally generated or bereft of geopolitical power plays, transnational actors and global-local networks using funds and cultural ”soft power” to advance geostrategic interests. More so today given that Sri Lanka’s urban religious communities are transnationally networked and social media-savvy in a context of significant post/colonial ethnic and religious diasporas.

However, in recent times and since the end of the 30 year war with the LTTE, much has been written about ‘religious violence’ being a “chronic” and ‘acute” disease in the island’s body politic, seemingly re-inscribing an orientalist myth about the perennial and pathological religious violence and nationalism of ‘others’, as if religious identity politics in the island and rest of Southeast Asia were unrelated to geopolitical actors and their religious ‘soft power’ interventions, and other transnational and diaspora networks, or the US-led Global War on Terror and related global Islamophobic discourse.

Yet, many scholars prior to and during the thirty-year armed conflict between the State and secular Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that ended in 2009, viewed religion/s as a social space and everyday practice that brought together people of diverse communities and bridged rather than divided members of the Sinhala and Tamil linguistic communities. St. Anthony’s church, targeted in the Easter attacks which were a frontal attack on the Island’s multi-religious social fabric, was exemplary in this context – bring together people of diverse faiths in this multicultural land.

Located at the ‘crossroads of history’ and colonized by competing European maritime powers (Portuguese, Dutch and British) for almost 450 years before independence in 1948, Sri Lanka, at the center of the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), has been often ‘islanded’ in the historical and social science literature on ethnic and religious conflict and violence in the island. In recent times and since the end of armed the 30 year war with the LTTE, much has been written about ‘religious violence’ being a “chronic” and ‘acute” disease in the island’s body politic, seemingly re-inscribing an orientalist myth about the perennial and pathological religious violence and nationalism of ‘others’, as if religious identity politics in the island were unrelated to geopolitical actors and their religious ‘soft power’ interventions, and other transnational and diaspora networks, or the US-led Global War on Terror and related global Islamophobic discourse.

Yet, many scholars prior to and during the thirty-year armed conflict between the State and secular Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that ended in 2009, viewed religion/s as a social space and everyday practice for healing and protection that brought together and bridged rather than divided members of the Sinhala and Tamil linguistic communities. St. Anthony’s church was exemplary in this context.

Ethnic and religious identity politics in the island has rarely been exclusively internally generated or bereft of geopolitical power plays and transnational actors and networks using funds and cultural”soft power” to advance geostrategic interests. More so today given that Sri Lanka’s urban religious communities are transnationally networked and social media-savvy in a context of significant post/colonial ethnic and religious diasporas.

During the Cold War period the island was subject to power plays and various covert and overt interventions from India (then officially non-aligned, but close to USSR), and the US and UK. Thus Sri Lanka’s first socialist Prime Minister, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike who nationalized the ports and airports from the British was mysteriously assassinated by the Buddhist Monk at the time when the CIA was weaponizing Buddhism and Islam to contain the spread of Communism from China and USSR[10]. This was a period of assassinations, coups and regime change operations from Patrice Lumumba in Congo, to Mossadegh in Iran to Suharto in Indonesia.

Recent developments in ‘global history’ writing and attempts to trace pre-modern Buddhist and Hindu pan Asian and IOR migrations and connectivity, notwithstanding ‘methodological nationalism’ and Cold War ‘area studies’ partitions of the Indian Ocean region, has persisted. Cold War ‘area studies’ partitioning of the Indian Ocean region into Southeast Asia, South and west Asia and the Arab world regions has also contributed to the islanding of Lanka in the historical and anthropological imagination. However, in his book Monsoon, Robert Kaplan insists that global power is increasingly centered on the Indian Ocean, arguing that the ocean’s position (bordering Asia, Africa, and the Middle East) makes it a global crossroad in areas that are top U.S. strategic concerns.

Sri Lanka has long been vulnerable to big powers and their networks of proxy states such as Saudi Arabia, seeking to destabilize this strategically located country in order to extend their influence and secure military bases in the IOR, as happened in the Chagos Islands in the 1960s when the UK and US built the massive Diego Garcia military base. Hence, anti-colonial and increasingly anti-western discourse is part of the political DNA of the island’s peoples, particularly the powerful Buddhist clergy and the Catholic Church influenced by Liberation Theology.

At this time, the seas of Sri Lanka are among the most important energy, trade, and communication routes in the world. Sri Lanka’s seabed is a spaghetti junction of undersea submarine data cable (UDC) routes, vital for Big Data collection and analysis and the global economy and financial system whose security is crucial for the global economy and cybersecurity.

The Indian Ocean Pan-E Undersea Data Cable Routes

The Indian Ocean, with Sri Lanka at Center is the third largest of the world’s five oceans, making up about 20% of Earth’s water.

Like the Covid-19 narrative that has forced de-globalization (and revered globalization that led to the rise of Asia), while promoting global surveillance and militarization, the Easter Sunday bombings were a hybrid attack on Sri Lanka’s economy and society.

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