From The Toronto Star
Attacks on mosques stir anew religious tensions in Sri Lanka, where about 9 per cent of the population — 1.4 million — practise Islam.
COLOMBO—Cellphone cameras captured the ugly scene: Muslims being chased through the streets by maddened Buddhists.
The vandals had just attacked a mosque in the Grandpass neighbourhood on the capital’s outskirts, falling upon Muslims at Friday prayers, smashing windows, then pursuing the worshippers with clubs, hurling stones. At least five people were hospitalized.
That was in early August and stirred anew religious tensions in this country, where about 9 per cent of the population — 1.4 million — practise Islam. Most are known as Moor Muslims, descendents of Arab traders who plied their trade along Sri Lanka’s coast as far back as the eighth century.
There had been similar mob assaults on mosques and Muslim businesses last March, incited in large measure by xenophobic rhetoric from Sinhala Buddhist extremists aligned with two fringe groups — Sihala Ravaya (Sinhalese Roar) and Bodu Bala Sena (Buddhist Power Force). Three Buddhist monks and four others were arrested with the arson attacks but were later freed because the victims declined to press charges. Others saw it — and the stand-around do-nothing response by police at Grandpass — as more evidence of how bigoted clerics operate with impunity from law enforcement and a government that values the endorsement of politicized monks.
Intimidation of Muslims and damage to their property hasn’t been confined to Colombo. In the past year, upwards of 20 mosques have been attacked across the country by Buddhist fanatics, according to the president of the Sri Lanka Muslim Council — a worrisome mirroring of the wide-scale violence in Buddhist-majority Burma, which has seen a surge of attacks against Muslims with monks at the forefront.
“We have lived peacefully, united, with other faiths for centuries,” says Sheik Fazil Farook, media secretary for the Congress of Muslim Theologians, an organization of 6,000 scholars in Sri Lanka. “Only in the recent past has there been turbulence by a very few groups who are trying to divide the community, hardliners who claim to be Buddhists. The majority do not approve of them.”
