The blame game begins after Sri Lanka bombings

IN THE AFTERMATH of a co-ordinated series of terrorist suicide-bombings in churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday that left nearly 300 people dead, attention has begun to focus on the goverment’s failure to act on warnings that such an attack was imminent. A bitter political battle between the president, Maithripala Sirisena, and the prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, had so crippled the government that it lacked the information to prevent the catastrophe, blamed on a little-known jihadist group.

The victims were mainly Christians who perished while attending Easter services in three churches in Colombo, nearby Negombo and Batticaloa on the east coast. At least 36 foreigners were among the dead in three other explosions at five-star hotels in Colombo. More than 500 people were injured in the explosions.

“We are very, very sorry as a government,” Rajitha Senaratne, its spokesman, said, before repeatedly claiming that Mr Sirisena had failed to give reports of a possible attack to Mr Wickremesinghe. Had he done so, it was implied, the carnage could have been avoided.

He said that national intelligence agencies had issued their warnings as early as April 4th. In a letter on April 9th the chief of national intelligence had even named suspects—a level of detail that is very rare for such warnings. And shortly before the attacks, the spy agencies’ foreign counterparts had again alerted Sri Lankan authorities that places of religious worship, especially of Catholics, and areas with high concentrations of tourists “may be targeted”.

Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, the local head of the Catholic church, said he would have cancelled all Easter masses had this crucial information been shared. The failure to communicate “makes us hold our heads in our hands”.

It was revealed that Mr Wickremesinghe has not even been invited to meetings of the national security council, which are chaired by the president, since October last year. That was when Mr Sirisena abruptly sacked the prime minister and replaced him with Mahinda Rajapaksa, his predecessor as president, before dissolving parliament. But in December Mr Sirisena was humiliatingly forced to reinstate Mr Wickremesinghe as prime minister, after courts ruled the dissolution unconstitutional and illegal.

The large scale and co-ordinated nature of the bombings—with 87 more bomb detonators discovered at Colombo’s main bus station on Monday—point to a high degree of planning and considerable sophistication. The attacks are the first on such a scale since the end of the bloody 27-year civil war with the Tamil Tigers ten years ago, and the deadliest co-ordinated acts of terrorism Sri Lanka has ever suffered. They are the first directed at Sri Lanka’s Christian minority.

Mr Senaratne blamed a local jihadist group called the National Thowheed Jamath (NTJ) and said the suicide-bombers were Sri Lankan. But he also said the strikes could not have succeeded without an international network. Shiral Lakthilake, a spokesman for the president, separately told journalists that the “involvement of international elements is clear”.

The NTJ is reported to have formed as a splinter of the Sri Lanka Thowheed Jamath (SLTJ) an ultra-conservative Islamist movement with ties to like-minded groups in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, a short distance across the sea. Radical Islamist networks, some fuelled by the rise of Islamic State, have also sprouted up in the broader region, from the Maldives to Bangladesh.

After the carnage more than 1,000 police and soldiers were deployed for security in Colombo alone. A state of emergency covering the whole country is to go into effect at midnight on April 22nd. Mr Sirisena also appointed a three-member panel to investigate the “causes and circumstances of the tragedy” and declared April 23rd a day of national mourning. On Twitter Asanga Welikala, a law lecturer, described this gesture as “absolute rubbish tokenism”.

There was also dismay at the way debate soon descended to political infighting. The attacks, however, have spurred an open discussion about the growth of jihadism in Sri Lanka. The conversation has been muted because of fears of stoking anti-Muslim sentiment. Extremist Buddhists from the Sinhala majority have on occasion attacked Muslims on various pretexts.

But Muslim leaders have started speaking up. Rauff Hakeem, leader of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, a political party, said that Muslims and their leaders “have to engage in introspection regarding what is happening within the community”. He also said that community had been trying for a very long time, including through its mosques, to tackle the spread of extremism.