Six years to the day and hundreds of promises and three different presidents and governments later, with a fourth president and government in office, Sri Lanka is no closer to identifying the mastermind/s behind the deadly Easter Sunday attacks than on that fateful day of 21 April 2019.
The promises of swift justice have been plenty; so have the appointment of numerous commissions of inquiry and their equally numerous reports, yet, six long years later, the country is still awaiting justice for the perpetrators of what is decidedly the most despicable crime this country has experienced.
It is beyond doubt that the attack was professionally planned and meticulously carried out. Even during the height of the war, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who introduced suicide bombing and had access to innumerable global resources through its extensive diaspora network, seemingly lacked the professional expertise shown by the Easter Sunday bombers who attacked six locations with deadly force within a matter of minutes, missing out on the seventh target for reasons yet unknown.
In a nation not unused to such terror attacks in the past, it has been observed that the contours of this crime were too great for it to have been an amateur job of an amateur outfit as consistently made out in the official narrative. The passage of time has also discounted actual ISIS involvement as made out at the time, with that attempt increasingly looking like an elaborate decoy for reasons best known to the investigators.
The scale of the attacks – seven locations including three churches and three five-star hotels (the Taj for some reason being spared at the 11th hour), being bombed in concert using high-tech C4 explosives carried by well-trained suicide bombers – is clear enough indication of a powerful and resourceful hand being behind it all, the monetary cost of which alone has been estimated to run into millions of rupees, beyond the financial clout of a home-grown radical outfit.
If the past six years have revealed anything, given the paucity of progress in the official investigation, it is that these attacks bore the hallmarks of a crime rooted in political greed with hardly any evidence to the contrary. It is for this reason that the calls for justice remain as strong today as they were on that fateful Easter morning.
As the Christian and Catholic communities head for Easter Sunday worship this morning, they will do so not only with vivid memories of the deadly attacks still etched in their minds, but also with the added knowledge that the mastermind that was behind it is still roaming free despite the blood on their hands. It is for this reason that churchgoers not only continue to be uneasy, necessitating a strong security presence in churches, but have contributed to keeping the issue in the forefront, unaffected by the sands of time, which in itself is a miracle considering that no issue, however grave it may be, lasts longer than a couple of weeks in notoriously forgetful Sri Lanka. Batalanda, anyone?
While the wait for justice continues, politicians who have held power in the last six years continue to play politics not only over the mutilated corpses of the 270 innocent victims but also the hundreds more who to date carry either life-altering or life-threatening injuries that are stark reminders of the state of impunity that continues to prevail.
Interestingly, there has been very little focus on the economic impact of the attacks, which in fact laid the foundation for Sri Lanka’s economic collapse just three years later in April 2022, and to date continues to affect hundreds of thousands of lives.
Rather mysteriously, no one has yet come up with a plausible explanation as to why four of the topmost hotels in this country suddenly became terror targets. The attacks resulted in completely drying up tourist arrivals for at least the next three months, equating to an estimated revenue loss of $ 1.2 billion going by the previous year’s tourism earnings of $ 4.5 billion from 2.3 million tourists.
The question no one has yet asked is, who would have benefited from destroying Sri Lanka’s robust tourism industry at the time? It also leads to the question as to which really was the primary target: whether it was in fact the churches and the Christian faithful while the hotels were simply collateral damage, or the other way around. What this country needs is answers.
As disappointing as it is, the current National People’s Power (NPP) Government ascended to office on the strength of promising swift justice, but over the course of the last seven months has only used the issue as political leverage whenever an election is around the corner. Fresh after his Presidential Election victory, the President was invited by Archbishop of Colombo Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith to St. Sebastian’s Church in Katuwapitiya, where standing on the once-blood-soaked altar – an unprecedented act in a Catholic place of worship where politics and politicians have had no place – the President made a solemn promise that the masterminds would be exposed in a matter of weeks if not months. The results of the General Elections the following month reflected the impact of that promise.
However, five months later, that same promise was repeated by the President, which prompted the Cardinal to issue an ultimatum coinciding with the sixth anniversary of the Easter Sunday attacks that if no tangible progress was made in exposing the masterminds, he would once again be compelled to bring the people on to the streets. Today being D-day, we will have to wait and see whether the exposé will take place or, in its absence, whether the Cardinal will walk the talk. Whatever the case may be, the results of the Local Government Polls in two weeks’ time will indicate what the people feel.
As things stand, it appears that the regime seems to be playing the same old game of its predecessors, leading the public in general and the Catholic Church in particular up the garden path with promises that the great revelation is near every time an election is around the corner. This is despite the fact that the chief investigating officers at the time of the attacks are now in powerful positions of the administration; ex-DIG Ravi Seneviratne serving as Secretary to the Ministry of Public Security and former SSP Shani Abeysekara in a specially created role as Director Crimes of the Police. Notwithstanding the deadline set by the Cardinal or the imminent revelation promised by the regime, the ordinary citizenry are understandably disappointed by the lack of progress and the paucity of results, leading them to question whether what is is any different to what was.
Be that as it may, what is clear, by default, is that the attacks were politically motivated. If that were to be the case, who then is the politician who benefited most from the attacks? It will be recalled that Gotabaya Rajapaksa dramatically announced his candidature for the Presidential Election later that year just days after the attacks, citing the need for a candidate of his calibre to take on “the new terror threats” and “ensure national security”.
Capitalising on the fears of the people, his comprehensive win at the Presidential Poll later that year was a foregone conclusion, with the United National Party led by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe that was in office at the time of the attacks being decimated to the extent that it failed to win a single seat in Parliament in 2020. It was thanks to the Proportional Representation electoral system that it managed to get a bonus seat – the very seat that later propelled Wickremesinghe to the presidency.
Having started on the right foot by promising to bring in Scotland Yard to investigate the crime, Wickremesinghe, this time as President, let the nation down again by failing to walk the talk and once again the electoral result spoke for itself. With both Rajapaksa in 2019 and Wickremesinghe in 2022 failing to keep their promises of a swift investigation, the Archbishop of Colombo can be excused for believing that third time will be the charm, but despite his seemingly enormous faith in the regime, numerous promises and self-proclaimed deadlines have come and gone. The writing seems to be on the wall. Justice delayed is justice denied.