"Peaceful" Buddhists on the Rampage Again

Yet again, Sri Lanka has erupted into mob violence supposedly because of religion. Previously, the Buddhist majority urged on by militant monks targeted Hindu Tamils as documented by the Socialist Standard.

On this occasion, it is the Muslim population which is being who are being attacked. 

The Sri Lankan prime minister, Ranil Wickramsinghe, said the violence in the town “appeared to be systemic and organised."

Alan Keenan, a Sri Lanka specialist with the International Crisis Group, said radical Buddhist groups had been staging attacks against Muslims with “a significant degree of regularity” since 2012 and especially since last April. “One of the key underlying elements is the sense that many Sinhalese and Buddhists have is that Sri Lanka is a Sinhalese and Buddhist island and other community, Muslims and Tamils, are here on the sufferance of the majority,” he said.

In 2002, a supposedly statistic-based story in a popular newspaper had said that at the rate at which the population of the two communities is changing, the Sinhalese would become a minority in Sri Lanka. This not only created apprehension in the Sinhalese Buddhist population but gave a fillip to radical Buddhist groups which were promoting the concept of “Sri Lanka for Sinhalese Buddhists” in which the minority Tamils and Muslims will have to be subservient to the majority.

The increasing influence of Wahabi Islam among Sri Lankan Muslims replacing Sufi Islam,  and the proliferation of mosques built with Saudi money, had resulted in the Muslims being seen as “not one of us” but as “the other”.  In the past, Sri Lankan Muslim traders and artisans had specific roles to play in Buddhist religious festivities, but these began to be frowned upon by Wahabi purists backed by Saudi funded new Islamic institutions.

Keenan said the previous president, the staunch Sinhala nationalist Mahinda Rajapaksa, had condoned instances of anti-Muslim violence and hate speech. The renewed violence in past months could be related to the growing strength of Rajapaksa’s opposition movement

“Many have argued that it [the inter-communal violence] is a product of the search for a new enemy to replace the Tamils, unite the Sinhala, and win votes by cultivating a sense of Sinhala Buddhists under siege,” Keenan said.

Others blame the hardline Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) group for the ongoing violence. Some Buddhist nationalist have also protested against the presence in Sri Lanka of Muslim Rohingya asylum-seekers from mostly Buddhist Myanmar, where Buddhist nationalism has also been on the rise.

“A lot people around the world buy into this peaceful Buddhism stereotype without realizing that there are Buddhist extremists who continually spread hate speech and instigate violence against other religions, particularly Islam, in both Sri Lanka and Myanmar,” Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, told Newsweek. “The hard-liners in these two countries have forged a mutual admiration and support network for their intolerance that occasionally flares into this kind of unacceptable violence,” he said.

Muslims make up about 9 percent of Sri Lanka’s 21 million people. Buddhists make up about 70 percent and ethnic Tamils, most of whom are Hindus, about 13 percent.  Muslims were first heard of in Sri Lanka from the early 8th century.