Sri Lanka

Region: South Asia / Sri Lanka

Overview

Sri Lanka is a country tragically familiar with ethno-religious conflict, having fought a brutal civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the original pioneers of suicide bombing, for a quarter century between 1983 and 2009. The conflict claimed as many as 100,000 lives before the LTTE, comprising radical members of the country’s Hindu Tamil minority, was decimated by a Sri Lankan military offensive in 2009 that also carried a heavy civilian toll. However, until recently the island’s Muslim population was largely removed from communal tensions and religious violence and there was little history of violent Islamist groups operating in the country.

The island nation of roughly 25 million citizens off southeastern coast of India is majority Buddhist, with large Hindu, Muslim, and Christian minorities. The religious divide between Buddhist and Hindus largely parallels an ethnic divide between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils more concentrated in the country’s north. This has historically been the principal ethno-religious fault line in the nation, and the basis for the aforementioned civil war.

Though a small number of Sri Lankans were found to have traveled to join the Islamic State in the Middle East, Sri Lankan Muslims are considered largely moderate, rejecting more fundamentalist interpretations of Islam with little history of violence or terrorism. Indeed, prior to 2019, there had never been a significant terrorist attack inside Sri Lanka perpetrated by an Islamist group. That changed dramatically on Easter Day, April 21, 2019, when a heinous multi-pronged terrorist attack largely targeting Sri Lanka’s Christian minority claimed over 250 lives. It was not only the first terrorist attack since the country’s civil war ended in 2009; it was the deadliest terrorist attack in Sri Lankan history—and indeed all of South Asian history.

AUGUST 2021 UPDATE
The Rajapaska government’s abuses of the country’s decades-old Prevention of Terrorism Act continue to garner concern from international observers. The Sri Lankan government pledged in early 2021 to review the Act’s provisions as part of its efforts to expand trade with the European Union.