On March 13, Sarath Weerasekara, Sri Lanka’s minister of public security, announced that the government will ban wearing of the burqa and close more than 1,000 Islamic schools in the country. The minister was quoted as saying that “the burqa” was a “sign of religious extremism” and has a “direct impact on national security”.
The news was picked up internationally and resulted in several statements by human rights organisations and the UN special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, Ahmed Shaheed, as well as from Pakistan’s ambassador to Sri Lanka. Three days later the government stepped back from Weerasekera’s statement. Cabinet spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella announced that the decision “requires time” and a consultative process.
The burqa ban announcement caused a stir among Muslims, who saw it as yet another attack on their community. In the past few months, the government has undertaken a number of controversial measures under the banner of fighting extremism, which have increasingly intimidated the Muslim population and disregarded rule of law principles.
The anti-Muslim movement
Since it gained independence from the British in 1948, Sri Lanka has witnessed tumultuous relations between the Sinhala Buddhist majority, which makes up about 70 percent of the population and the Hindu and Christian Tamil minority, which accounts for roughly 12 percent. During the war between the military forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), other minorities, like the Muslims, who make up around nine percent of the population, were targeted less frequently by ultra-nationalist Sinhalese groups.
After the end of the civil war in 2009, an anti-Muslim movement initiated by the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), with the monk Galabod Aththe Gnanasara at the helm, began to emerge. The BBS is an activist group led by Buddhist monks which mobilised around what they described as the threat posed by the “social separatism” of “extremist Muslims”. Their definition of extremism, however, seems to encompass the majority of Muslims’ everyday practices.
The BBS’s large public rallies and their strident social media campaigns normalised hate speech and everyday low-intensity harassment of Muslims across the country. Incitement by the BBS and the cultivation of anti-Muslim sentiment over the post-war years also led to violent attacks against small Muslim communities in 2014, 2017 and 2018. The BBS also aligned itself with similar groups in Myanmar.
Following these incidents, the local authorities did not take serious action against BBS and other similar groups and in some cases blamed Muslims for the violence.
In 2019, anti-Muslim hatred escalated further after eight suicide bombers pledging allegiance to the Islamic State detonated themselves at churches, hotels and other locations across the country on Easter Sunday. There was evidence of the failure to pursue available intelligence by the security establishment and negligence on the part of the political leadership. However, the media coverage of the event and government policy discussion in the aftermath primarily targeted the country’s Muslim population.
Experts rarely referenced the role of the anti-Muslim movement in radicalising local Muslims. In May, there were violent retaliatory attacks against Muslim communities in the northwest.
The government response to the attack was to embrace the anti-Muslim language of the BBS and initiate sweeping arrests of suspected followers of the group responsible for the bombings.
Since then, several prominent Muslims have also been arbitrarily targeted by the government, with little or no evidence produced of their wrongdoing. In April 2020, the police arrested Hejaaz Hisbullah, an activist lawyer, on suspicion of aiding the attackers. Then in May 2020, Ahnaf Jazeem, a young Muslim poet, was also detained under the same pretext. Recently, the former leader of the Jamati Islami, Hajjul Akbar was arrested and detained for a second time, again without charges being filed.
In the aftermath of the Easter Sunday attacks, a parliamentary sectoral oversight committee on national security was set up to put together proposals for terrorism prevention measures. It has made recommendations in 14 areas, many of which curb the religious rights of the Muslim minority.
The burqa ban and the closing of Islamic schools stem from these recommendations, as do several other measures recently taken. In early March, the government declared that all Islamic books imported into the country will need defence ministry approval. Several days later, it gazetted a set of regulations ominously sub-titled “Deradicalisation from holding violent extremist religious ideology” under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The regulations give it powers to arrest and forward persons to a rehabilitation centre to be “deradicalised” for one year on suspicion without requiring any additional process.
