--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- [Discussion of the Going Through It podcast]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You ever go see like a big blockbuster superhero movie and think, man, this is great, except for the fact that like all the female characters are super one dimensional and used as crutches. There's a new original podcast from MailChimp called Going Through It, where we're 14 different women tell 14 super dynamic, compelling stories about their lives. You can subscribe and listen now wherever you listen to your podcasts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was working last Tuesday morning when an aunt of mine sent me a message. She said her best friend's aunt and daughter had died in one of the hotel bombings in Sri Lanka. The whole family was at the Shangri-La Hotel in Colombo for an Easter buffet. Her friend's aunt and daughter went to get dessert, and then the bomb went off. The two of them died. Everyone else in the family lived. The two of them died because they went to get dessert.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: My aunt sent me a selfie her friend's daughter had posted on Facebook minutes before she died. Everyone's smiling. Everyone's happy. These messages my aunt sent kind of destroyed me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Last week, I had to go pretty quickly from make sure family in Sri Lanka is okay to make a podcast about the attacks. Hearing this one tragic story forced me to sort of slow down and think about what was lost.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Roelle Raymond, the reporter from Roar Media in Colombo I spoke to last week, she more or less went through the same thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think it's been, for me personally, really, really, I can't say, I don't know how to say it. I mean, it took its toll. Let's say a week later, it took its toll. By last evening, I was at the brink of collapse.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But I don't think I was really thinking about it at the time. It was more about getting the news out really fast, finding out what was happening, not just for myself, but also for other people who were following and wanting to know. And fielding a lot of calls, taking a lot of calls, going to as many places as I could.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so, yeah, I was very busy and I didn't really have time to even perhaps accept or understand on a human level or personal level what had happened. And it's only now there's some sort of there's a sense of anxiety, which I can't really explain.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There is a lot of pain. I'm very sad about what has happened to my country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think people have an understanding now of what has happened, I think, also because this age of social media, people are using VPNs to get online and piecing together what happened based on information that's being reported.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So although the government hasn't in many cases explicitly said this is what happened or this is the person behind it, people have already pieced together the story.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In Sri Lanka's east, police were edgy today as they raided a base of an Islamist group linked to last week's devastating terror attacks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It seems that this one guy, the leader of a local Muslim extremist group, the national Thawid Jamaat, his name is Zahran Hashim. He was an imam.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It seems that he was the mastermind behind this. A lot of his family members were involved.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We heard that his sister, one sister, who somehow seemed to have escaped all of this and didn't really know what was going on, had told the media that members in her family had died in this whole fiasco.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Fifteen people have died, including six children, after a security operation in eastern Sri Lanka. Troops raided a suspected safe house close to the hometown of the alleged ringleader behind last weekend's attacks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Gunmen opened fire on security forces before three men detonated explosives.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What more do we know about this guy, Mohamed Zahran Hashim?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what we're hearing is that he was born in Kaatankuri, in the eastern province, that he didn't come from a very affluent family.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We hear that he had his early education at a madrasa. and how as he grew up he began to question what was being taught to him because he had a different interpretation and opinion and it got to the point that he was kicked out of that madrasa.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We learned that later he got very much more fundamentalist in his thinking than he set up the National Tawid Jamaat himself, set up mosques in the name of the National Thawid Jamaat.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it got to the point where even the National Thawid Jamaat kicked him out later for his sort of radical extremist ideology.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We heard that he was a very persuasive speaker, that he would get as many as 2,000 or 3,000 people to listen to him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And a lot of his preaching happened online, on Facebook, on YouTube.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it seemed that he was just, I don't know, from my layperson's point of view, an angry, misguided man with a score to settle.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there's been these reports that he had ties to, like, one of the wealthiest spice traders in Sri Lanka.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's all that about?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Of the suicide bombers, two were sons of a wealthy spice merchant who was very well accepted in the business circles, who was accepted in the political circles.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The speculation, even from the prime minister, is that it's quite possible that this man didn't know what his sons were doing although he is also now under arrest
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Last week when we spoke we talked a bit about how the government had warnings about these attacks but failed to act on them
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What more have we learned about how much the government knew?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, the government has now confirmed repeatedly that the intelligence was definitive.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The prime minister himself actually did confirm that this was intelligence that was received.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's even more damning is the fact that India confirmed or India said that they had sent three alerts, the last of which came just hours before the attack.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the warnings had definitely been communicated to Sri Lankan authorities, but they were not acted on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I have explained before how on a political theater this turned out to be a blame game because the prime minister thinks the president should be held responsible for this lapse in security.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Whereas the president thinks that the prime minister is the one who weakened the country's intelligence by going after military personnel for alleged war crimes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So there was this spat initially midway during the week with both parties pointing fingers at each other.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And of course, the government now, maybe it's overcompensating. It's certainly taking many actions on many fronts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Could you run us through everything the Sri Lankan government is now doing to investigate this and perhaps prevent an attack like this from happening again?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, it does seem like they're on overdrive, in fact, in ensuring that this doesn't occur again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I'm pleased to note that even if belatedly, whatever has to kick in has kicked in.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's some 7,000 soldiers, army soldiers in Colombo alone.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The rest of the army is deployed all over the island.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's extensive search operations ongoing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The president said every house would be searched.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A database would be set up so that people know if anyone unknown to the area moves in.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's naval patrolling going on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's air surveillance, sniffer dogs on the roads, barricades in certain areas.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All the key places of business and public places are definitely being protected.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In addition, the president, under emergency regulations, not only did he ban the national, or said he would ban the national Tawid Jamaat and the Jamia Thul Milathul Ibrahim, another nationalist Muslim extremist organization.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He also said that all face covering, he didn't use the word burqa, but he did say all face covering would be banned under emergency regulations.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The emergency measure was announced by the president's office last night.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It had been discussed last week, but postponed until government officials had a chance to consult with Muslim clerics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Were any of the terrorists who perpetrated these attacks wearing face coverings?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, definitely they weren't.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: However, the fear of more attacks and there have been more internal security memos leaked to the public saying there would be attacks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In fact, two other Muslim sects were supposed to be targets of these attacks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think with this ongoing fear of more attacks, it's becoming more and more important for the police and the armed forces to be able to identify people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: and it's I think for that reason that they want people to no longer cover their faces.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They haven't said anything about the hijab so it's not about covering your head, it's just that they want the face visible.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think it's mostly to do with tracking down people and just easy identification.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you have any sense of how Muslims in the country feel right now?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean I do genuinely feel that they feel violated
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But at the same time, they are very cooperative because, unfortunately, I feel that the biggest victims to this attack are the Muslims themselves.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because one extremist group of Muslims perpetrated a series of attacks that has caused the entire Muslim community to be looked on with suspicion.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: even the most generous-minded person is still going to be wary now going forward, which is, for me, possibly the saddest thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How about the rest of the country?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, the government reported last week that they were planning on going door-to-door to root out terrorists, which I don't know if I've ever heard anything like that from any country after a terrorist attack.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How are tensions in the country right now?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think strangely enough, people perhaps feel safer with the armed forces coming door to door, because then you can establish the fact that you have nothing to hide and people who do have something to hide will be caught out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Also, I think the main thing that a lot of people need to understand is Sri Lanka has gone through this before.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In fact, there are some complaining they don't see enough in some areas and they wished there would be more armed forces out there on the ground.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I don't think that has been received very badly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think people are just very keen to ensure they are secure.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's high tension. There's definitely high tension.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People are avoiding public places. They're avoiding stepping out as much as possible.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: if you are running an errand you try to get from point A to point B as fast as possible you don't dawdle
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: it's the topic on everyone's mind
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: it hasn't been forgotten
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: the fear is very real and very present that hasn't abated
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: but people are being forced to get on with their lives
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a week now
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The streets are a lot quieter
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: but people are now being forced out of necessity to get back to working and getting along with their lives.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the fear is present, and they are afraid that at some point something will happen and there will be another attack.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Roelle Raymond covers Sri Lanka for Roar Media. You can find her work at Roar.media.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Sri Lankan government is taking lots of action, but all told, it might be taking the wrong kind of action.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's next on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I've given you some general information about the Going Through It podcast from MailChimp.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Here's a bit more on the specifics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's an episode up right now you can listen to featuring Hillary Clinton.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hillary Clinton talks about what happened in her life when she was afraid she couldn't hack it and wanted to give up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Anne Friedman, the host of the show, talks with Hillary about her imposter syndrome.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Did you know Hillary Clinton had imposter syndrome?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They also talk about the intimidation that comes with bigger challenges and pushing forward and pushing for bigger things instead of quitting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Super powerful people. They're just like us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Anyway, the whole deal with going through it, Anne sits down with writers, comedians, politicians, musicians to hear about the pivotal moments in their lives and careers and relationships when they had to decide whether to quit or keep going.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All of the episodes of the show are out now so you can subscribe and just consume the thing all in one evening or a weekend or over the course of a very emotional week.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Amarnath Amarasingham, when we spoke about the attacks in Sri Lanka last Monday, you said this didn't look homegrown. Outside groups had to be involved.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it turns out you were right. There were links to the Islamic State.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why would the Islamic State want to mess with a relatively peaceful tropical island in the Indian Ocean?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, I don't think the question is why did ISIS target Sri Lanka?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's much more so that there are local groups in a variety of different countries, South Asia, Southeast Asia, parts of Africa, who are kind of galvanized by local grievances, who are making contact and interacting with members of these transnational terrorist groups who are using it for kind of branding their own movement.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because for ISIS, it's very much part of their repertoire to attack tourist sites and attack Christian communities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: because they realized that it creates much more media coverage, it creates much more kind of international coverage as opposed to being if these local groups had attacked this Sri Lankan government site or something like that, which would have made a splash maybe for a day or two and then vanished.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Whereas now you've killed several citizens of several countries, you've kind of galvanized the global conservative Christian movement as well to say that there is an ongoing war on Christians internationally that local governments are not doing enough to protect.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so this feeds into several different narratives happening in North America and Europe as well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Tucker Carlson tonight.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The holiest day of the Christian calendar turned to tragedy yesterday, as you know, in Sri Lanka.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This was a message that there's basically a war on Christianity from a certain segment of the Muslim population.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It is literally a holy war.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so Sri Lanka seemed like as good a place as any to stir up religious tensions?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, I think it feeds into kind of long-running Islamophobia in the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think we forget sometimes that brown people can be just as racist as white people, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that there is kind of a long-running anti-Muslim sentiment and anti-Muslim hatred in the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, regular Tamil people and regular Sinhalese people often also feel very kind of uneasy about the niqab and face coverings and so on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Just like, you know, you would have most people in Europe or a good chunk of people in Europe and North America would similarly have sentiments like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think just a kind of response to this scale of an attack, I think, is also creating this impression that there are kind of simple solutions to this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can just do one or two things like ban the niqab and all of a sudden we'll be back to normal, you know, and we'll be back to a kind of peaceful situation, which I think is going to prove wrong pretty quickly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sri Lanka is no stranger to suicide bombers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is it fair to say that these attacks coming from international religious extremists are a new thing for the country?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, I think there's an element to which the violence during the Civil War was normalized.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People had kind of gotten used to being uneasy and kind of got spoiled by 10 years of relative peace.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And therefore now there's this newfound fear that this isn't just a short-term thing or just a one-off attack, that this is part of a longer campaign that they need to be vigilant for.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And part of the way you're vigilant for it is to stamp down on minority communities and minority rights.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that's going to prove to be not a smart choice and not a smart move.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But I think generally the way this country goes and generally the way the politicians kind of play crisis sometimes is to violate human rights and with heightened surveillance and heightened harassment of community members which you know one would hope that after 10 years of peace and 26 years of conflict you know you kind of learned the lesson and not to do that kind of stuff
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It doesn't actually work
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It doesn't actually help
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But as we seeing I think none of the lessons of the past 30 years or so have been actually internalized by the government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, what Roel was saying earlier was that, you know, some people actually feel much more secure right now in the country because the government is taking the kinds of actions it is saying they're going to go door to door saying no more face coverings.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You're saying in what you've studied in your research on terrorism, that stuff doesn't work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, not only does that stuff not work, it actually further marginalizes the communities, further creates resentment that they're somehow to blame for the violent actions of a few amongst them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, a lot of the videos that I've seen on YouTube and WhatsApp and Facebook of Muslim community members are unbelievably angry at the attackers because they realize, and there's a lot of sadness there about what's going to happen to the community.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there's a lot of anger at the attackers to say, you know, you've basically taken the community back a thousand years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're never going to be trusted again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People are never going to look at us the same way again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's been rumors of kind of Muslims being registered in the north.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's been rumors of kind of individuals being kicked off buses because they're carrying a package that's slightly larger than what people are comfortable with and things like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I don't think any of these things are going to help in the long term to kind of move things forward.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What could the Sri Lankan government do to ensure peace in the country while not infringing on the human rights of Muslims in the country?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They handled it somewhat well in terms of the social media crackdown and at least an attempt to kind of stamp out misinformation and disinformation online.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But I think their real life response has been a bit of a joke.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's just been political blame game and kind of figuring out a way to make this a national security issue.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Whatever positive response is actually arising out of this attack has actually come from the Christian community, remarkably, where they've, particularly during Friday prayers, many in the community came out to say that they will protect the mosques from attack and make sure that these things don't happen.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so I think there's room for communities to kind of respond in those kinds of ways, but it could have really been supported and pushed from the top, but we haven't seen anything like that happening.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: From the top down, I mean, it's fundamentally important to make communities feel like they're part of the country, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think Sri Lanka has always struggled with that from independence onwards to fully make sense of the minorities among them and minority political concerns among them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because it has always been pitched as a single national Buddhist state and they didn't really know how to respond properly to kind of integrating communities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that would have been the ideal response.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: and that's been the ideal response when other countries have struggled through this, where you hold national vigils, you have a national conversation about the place of minorities in the country, the importance of multiculturalism, diversity, pluralism.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And since 9-11, but more recently since the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, you've seen, too often, people conflating the horrific acts of terrorism with the beliefs of an entire faith.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And of course, recently we've heard inexcusable political rhetoric against Muslim Americans that has no place in our country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I've said many times, Mr. Speaker, we are a nation of 200 ethnicities, 160 languages.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We open our doors to others and say welcome.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the only thing that must change after the events of Friday is that this same door must close on all of those who espouse hate and fear.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to your new home.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You'll find our winters are a little colder.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The way Prime Minister Trudeau in Canada went to the airport after there was some controversy around Syrian refugees and accepting Syrian refugees to provide winter jackets to Syrian refugees who were landing at the airport.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We've got some stuff for you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We'll load you down with stuff.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're really out of words.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You are home.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome home.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Things like that, I think, go a long way to kind of creating an important point of leadership to say, you know, this is what our country represents and this is what we're going to do, regardless of what the kind of domestic controversy around these issues are.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So some countries are kind of, have a history of doing that, have a culture of doing that, where I think it's very outside the norm to have those kinds of discussions in Sri Lanka to begin with.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Amarnath Amarasingham is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's an organization that tries to come up with solutions to extremism and polarization around the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks to the MailChimp original podcast, Going Through It, for supporting Vox's original podcast, Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Going Through It features 14 different women talking about their great successes and their great setbacks and failures.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can subscribe and listen now wherever you listen to your shows.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: You ever go see like a big blockbuster superhero movie and think, man, this is great, except for the fact that like all the female characters are super one dimensional and used as crutches.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: There's a new original podcast from MailChimp called Going Through It, where we're 14 different women tell 14 super dynamic, compelling stories about their lives.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: You can subscribe and listen now wherever you listen to your podcasts.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: I was working last Tuesday morning when an aunt of mine sent me a message.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: She said her best friend's aunt and daughter had died in one of the hotel bombings in Sri Lanka.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: The whole family was at the Shangri-La Hotel in Colombo for an Easter buffet.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Her friend's aunt and daughter went to get dessert, and then the bomb went off.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: The two of them died.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Everyone else in the family lived.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: The two of them died because they went to get dessert.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: My aunt sent me a selfie her friend's daughter had posted on Facebook minutes before she died.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Everyone's smiling. Everyone's happy.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: These messages my aunt sent kind of destroyed me.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Last week, I had to go pretty quickly from make sure family in Sri Lanka is okay to make a podcast about the attacks.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Hearing this one tragic story forced me to sort of slow down and think about what was lost.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Roelle Raymond, the reporter from Roar Media in Colombo I spoke to last week, she more or less went through the same thing.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: I think it's been, for me personally, really, really, I can't say, I don't know how to say it.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: I mean, it took its toll.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Let's say a week later, it took its toll.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: By last evening, I was at the brink of collapse.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: But I don't think I was really thinking about it at the time.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: It was more about getting the news out really fast, finding out what was happening, not just for myself, but also for other people who were following and wanting to know.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: And fielding a lot of calls, taking a lot of calls, going to as many places as I could.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: And so, yeah, I was very busy and I didn't really have time to even perhaps accept or understand on a human level or personal level what had happened.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: And it's only now there's some sort of there's a sense of anxiety, which I can't really explain.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: There is a lot of pain.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: I'm very sad about what has happened to my country.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: I think people have an understanding now of what has happened, I think, also because this age of social media, people are using VPNs to get online and piecing together what happened based on information that's being reported.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: So although the government hasn't in many cases explicitly said this is what happened or this is the person behind it, people have already pieced together the story.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: In Sri Lanka's east, police were edgy today as they raided a base of an Islamist group linked to last week's devastating terror attacks.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: It seems that this one guy, the leader of a local Muslim extremist group, the national Thawid Jamaat, his name is Zahran Hashim.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: He was an imam.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: It seems that he was the mastermind behind this.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: A lot of his family members were involved.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: We heard that his sister, one sister, who somehow seemed to have escaped all of this and didn't really know what was going on, had told the media that members in her family had died in this whole fiasco.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Fifteen people have died, including six children, after a security operation in eastern Sri Lanka.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Troops raided a suspected safe house close to the hometown of the alleged ringleader behind last weekend's attacks.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Gunmen opened fire on security forces before three men detonated explosives.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: What more do we know about this guy, Mohamed Zahran Hashim?
--:-- Roelle Raymond: So what we're hearing is that he was born in Kaatankuri, in the eastern province, that he didn't come from a very affluent family.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: We hear that he had his early education at a madrasa.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: and how as he grew up he began to question what was being taught to him because he had a different interpretation and opinion and it got to the point that he was kicked out of that madrasa.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: We learned that later he got very much more fundamentalist in his thinking than he set up the National Tawid Jamaat himself, set up mosques in the name of the National Thawid Jamaat.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: But it got to the point where even the National Thawid Jamaat kicked him out later for his sort of radical extremist ideology.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: We heard that he was a very persuasive speaker, that he would get as many as 2,000 or 3,000 people to listen to him.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: And a lot of his preaching happened online, on Facebook, on YouTube.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: So it seemed that he was just, I don't know, from my layperson's point of view, an angry, misguided man with a score to settle.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: And there's been these reports that he had ties to, like, one of the wealthiest spice traders in Sri Lanka.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: What's all that about?
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Of the suicide bombers, two were sons of a wealthy spice merchant who was very well accepted in the business circles, who was accepted in the political circles.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: The speculation, even from the prime minister, is that it's quite possible that this man didn't know what his sons were doing although he is also now under arrest
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Last week when we spoke we talked a bit about how the government had warnings about these attacks but failed to act on them
--:-- Roelle Raymond: What more have we learned about how much the government knew?
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Well, the government has now confirmed repeatedly that the intelligence was definitive.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: The prime minister himself actually did confirm that this was intelligence that was received.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: What's even more damning is the fact that India confirmed or India said that they had sent three alerts, the last of which came just hours before the attack.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: So the warnings had definitely been communicated to Sri Lankan authorities, but they were not acted on.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: I have explained before how on a political theater this turned out to be a blame game because the prime minister thinks the president should be held responsible for this lapse in security.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Whereas the president thinks that the prime minister is the one who weakened the country's intelligence by going after military personnel for alleged war crimes.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: So there was this spat initially midway during the week with both parties pointing fingers at each other.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: And of course, the government now, maybe it's overcompensating. It's certainly taking many actions on many fronts.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Could you run us through everything the Sri Lankan government is now doing to investigate this and perhaps prevent an attack like this from happening again?
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Yeah, it does seem like they're on overdrive, in fact, in ensuring that this doesn't occur again.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: And I'm pleased to note that even if belatedly, whatever has to kick in has kicked in.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: There's some 7,000 soldiers, army soldiers in Colombo alone.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: The rest of the army is deployed all over the island.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: There's extensive search operations ongoing.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: The president said every house would be searched.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: A database would be set up so that people know if anyone unknown to the area moves in.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: There's naval patrolling going on.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: There's air surveillance, sniffer dogs on the roads, barricades in certain areas.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: All the key places of business and public places are definitely being protected.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: In addition, the president, under emergency regulations, not only did he ban the national, or said he would ban the national Tawid Jamaat and the Jamia Thul Milathul Ibrahim, another nationalist Muslim extremist organization.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: He also said that all face covering, he didn't use the word burqa, but he did say all face covering would be banned under emergency regulations.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: The emergency measure was announced by the president's office last night.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: It had been discussed last week, but postponed until government officials had a chance to consult with Muslim clerics.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Were any of the terrorists who perpetrated these attacks wearing face coverings?
--:-- Roelle Raymond: No, definitely they weren't.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: However, the fear of more attacks and there have been more internal security memos leaked to the public saying there would be attacks.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: In fact, two other Muslim sects were supposed to be targets of these attacks.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: I think with this ongoing fear of more attacks, it's becoming more and more important for the police and the armed forces to be able to identify people.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: and it's I think for that reason that they want people to no longer cover their faces.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: They haven't said anything about the hijab so it's not about covering your head, it's just that they want the face visible.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: I think it's mostly to do with tracking down people and just easy identification.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Do you have any sense of how Muslims in the country feel right now?
--:-- Roelle Raymond: I mean I do genuinely feel that they feel violated
--:-- Roelle Raymond: But at the same time, they are very cooperative because, unfortunately, I feel that the biggest victims to this attack are the Muslims themselves.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Because one extremist group of Muslims perpetrated a series of attacks that has caused the entire Muslim community to be looked on with suspicion.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: even the most generous-minded person is still going to be wary now going forward, which is, for me, possibly the saddest thing.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: How about the rest of the country?
--:-- Roelle Raymond: I mean, the government reported last week that they were planning on going door-to-door to root out terrorists, which I don't know if I've ever heard anything like that from any country after a terrorist attack.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: How are tensions in the country right now?
--:-- Roelle Raymond: I think strangely enough, people perhaps feel safer with the armed forces coming door to door, because then you can establish the fact that you have nothing to hide and people who do have something to hide will be caught out.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: Also, I think the main thing that a lot of people need to understand is Sri Lanka has gone through this before.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: In fact, there are some complaining they don't see enough in some areas and they wished there would be more armed forces out there on the ground.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: So I don't think that has been received very badly.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: I think people are just very keen to ensure they are secure.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: There's high tension. There's definitely high tension.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: People are avoiding public places. They're avoiding stepping out as much as possible.
--:-- Roelle Raymond: if you are running an errand you try to get from point A to point B as fast as possible you don't dawdle
--:-- Roelle Raymond: it's the topic on everyone's mind
