A week ago, Sri Lankan tourist guide Ricky Costa was preparing for a typically easy Sunday ferrying backpackers between Colombo’s tea shops and beach bars in his canary-yellow rickshaw. Then the blasts began. The coordinated suicide bombings by militants at hotels and churches killed more than 250 people and sent shockwaves through an Indian Ocean island state that had enjoyed relative peace since a civil war ended a decade ago.
How such a sophisticated operation could have been carried out in a country where violence by militants drawn from the minority was not high on the list of concerns has left Sri Lankans and foreign intelligence agencies stumped.
President Maithripala Sirisena has announced a total overhaul of the security establishment, blaming them for failing to communicate several warnings they had about potential attacks, including one from India hours before the first bomb.
However, interviews with more than a dozen people with direct knowledge of the Sri Lankan government and security apparatus, including military sources, senior diplomats and intelligence agents, suggest deeper failings that created an ideal environment for extremists looking for a soft target. Since Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka won a 26-year conflict against mostly ethnic Tamil separatists, a well-resourced military has failed to adapt to shifting security threats, the sources said.
“The government was asleep. The military was asleep. They’ve been asleep for a long time,” said Costa, perching on his rickshaw as a suspicious policeman peered inside. Costa’s analysis is a simplification, but some experts agree that a lack of preparedness was a significant factor that led to a little-known group being able to orchestrate the deadliest attack of its kind in South Asia’s history.
Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe have both apologised for any lapses that might have contributed to the attacks. Wickremesinghe said the government and security forces take “collective responsibility”.
There are no official figures on the size of Sri Lanka’s armed forces but experts estimate there are around 150,000 active military personnel and 80,000 police officers, both substantial forces for a country of just 22 million.
Despite its size, the military had become “flabby” and “unfocused”, according to one Western diplomat. Military personnel with little to do have been conscripted into commercial ventures, including whale-watching tours for tourists, running hair salons and tending to farms.
Military spokesman Sumith Atapattu said it was wrong to suggest that the armed forces had not given sufficient priority to evidence of emerging extremism, but added they could only take action when there was evidence of criminal activity.
“We have passed the necessary information to the relevant authorities. But what is the legal background the military has to control extremism? A person being radicalised is not an offence in our country,” he said.
“We are searching for reconciliation after a long period of war and we cannot use a sledgehammer to kill a fly.”
Another foreign diplomat said he spoke to a senior military intelligence official the day before the attacks to warn him of an imminent threat. When he asked the official if he would raise the warning to the top echelons of government, he was told “not during the holidays”.
“Ten years of peace breeds over-confidence,” the diplomat said. “It’s easy to focus on the last weeks and months, but this attack was made possible by a much longer-term decline in the functionality of Sri Lanka’s security services and government.”
The military has also been more focused on monitoring the country’s Tamil population and preventing another separatist insurgency than on a Muslim community that makes up only 10 per cent of the population, defence sources and experts said.
“This inattention could have created the opportunity for a local group —perhaps with external encouragement or support — to emerge from obscurity and perpetrate such lethal attacks,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. — Reuters
Joe Brock
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