The hazy link between the attacks in Sri Lanka and New Zealand

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Today's WorldView
Edited by Ruby Mellen
BY ADAM TAYLOR
BY ADAM TAYLOR
The hazy link between the attacks in Sri Lanka and New Zealand
(Eranga Jayawardena/AP; Vincent Yu/AP)</p>
(Eranga Jayawardena/AP; Vincent Yu/AP)

From some angles, the terrorist attacks that devastated Sri Lanka on Sunday look vastly different from the one that took place in New Zealand last month. They took place in different countries using different weapons. They targeted different religions and were motivated by different ideologies.

In Sri Lanka, coordinated bombings killed Christians at churches and tourists at hotels; the Islamic State later claimed credit for the attacks, which killed more than 350 people. Just a month earlier, on March 15, Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian, shot and killed 50 Muslims attending Friday prayers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Still, some see connections between these events — Sri Lankan officials suggested the bombings on Easter Sunday may have been in retaliation to last month’s attack in Christchurch. Ruwan Wijewardene, Sri Lanka’s state minister of defense, told reporters Tuesday that the attacks in his country were “motivated” by the attack in New Zealand.

It’s not the only attack Tarrant may have inspired: On Thursday, Turkey detained a suspected member of the Islamic State who it believes planned to attack Australians and New Zealanders.

It is unclear if Wijewardene found specific evidence of the Sri Lankan attackers’ motivations. Such an extensive plot would have been difficult to organize — it involved eight bombings in three cities — and the Islamic State’s announcement Tuesday that it was responsible made no mention of the massacre in New Zealand.

Determining the motivations behind extremist acts can be challenging, experts say, and extremists are generally vague about their reasoning. “Terrorist organizations are often opportunistic in the way that they claim justification or rationalization for their attacks,” Nicholas Rasmussen, a former senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, told my colleagues this week.

Even if the New Zealand shootings did not directly motivate the bombings in Sri Lanka, the events are similar in that they both targeted a religious minority in houses of worship. They did so not because of local concerns, but because of delusions about a global clash of civilizations.

The nature of the relationship between the attackers in Sri Lanka and the Islamic State is not yet known. The militant group has had a hand in planning complex and devastating attacks around the world, but also regularly claims attacks it is said to have “inspired.”

Even so, the fact that a group of Sri Lankan Muslims chose to claim allegiance to the Islamic State and target the country’s Christian community and popular tourist areas suggests a global audience in mind. As Amarnath Amarasingam, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told Today’s WorldView on Sunday, a locally minded group probably would have targeted Sri Lanka’s Buddhist majority.

In New Zealand, Tarrant was thinking internationally, too. On a Twitter account created just days before the shootings, he published a 74-page manifesto that offered a lurid vision of his racist worldview. During the attack, he used a mounted camera to live-stream his violence to an online audience. Despite attempts to restrict access to the manifesto and the footage online, the information quickly spread.

Tarrant offered his own version of a pledge of allegiance, claiming he had contacted a reborn Knights Templar group — a militant order with a fearsome reputation in battles against Muslim adversaries in the medieval Crusades — and received the blessing of Norwegian extremist Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in attacks on Oslo and a nearby island in 2011. This idea may have been aspirational: Breivik’s lawyer has cast doubt on the idea his client could have had contact with the outside world.

There is no indication Tarrant had the backing of an international group, and he would not have needed it anyway. Still, both he and the more-organized terrorists in Sri Lanka chose to attack the same soft target — and the vulnerability of the their victims resonated around the world.

Experts worry about simplifying the response to the attacks along religious lines, looking at it simply as a battle between Christians and Muslims. This lens ignores the myriad differences in terrorism across regions. “What explains violence in Sri Lanka probably doesn’t explain violence in Paris,” Shaun Casey, director of Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, told The Washington Post this week.

Neither the Islamic State nor far-right attackers such as Tarrant can be said to speak for an entire religion, and they don’t claim to.

The Islamic State might consider the Muslims who died in Tarrant’s rampage as “takfir,” a complicated term that indicates excommunication, or a nonbeliever, for living in a Western, Christian-majority country. Though some far-right terrorists have claimed to be motivated by Christianity, Tarrant’s manifesto stated his Christian identity was “complicated.” Instead, his extremist beliefs appear to be tied to racial identity.

But terrorist attacks are not primarily aimed at rallying your peers. They are aimed at terrorizing your enemies, and it’s not surprising that they work. Globally, Muslims and Christians are the victims of violence and persecution, and emphasizing the supposed conflict between the world’s two largest religions often is politically expedient.

“I think Islam hates us,” President Trump said before his election. He also suggested all foreign Muslims should be banned from the country (watered-down versions of this ban have been the subject of repeated court cases). After the shootings in Christchurch, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan played videos of the attack at campaign rallies and pledged to make the perpetrator “pay for it.”

For religious communities on either side, the net result is a vicious cycle. Hilmy Ahamed, vice president of the Muslim Council of Sri Lanka, said the Christchurch attack had some positive effects for Islamic communities. “The New Zealand attack opened the eyes of the world to the crisis the Muslims are facing,” he told CNN.

But Muslims in Sri Lanka are scared. “The Christians have always been brotherly with us, but some other people may want to take revenge, or take advantage, especially in rural areas where people are not protected. So we fear,” Shafi Mula, the manager of a mosque in Colombo, told The Post’s Pamela Constable. “We fear.”

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• Meanwhile in Vladivostok, Russia, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The meeting marks Kim’s latest trip abroad to meet another world leader, but it comes amid a lack of progress in both denuclearization talks with the United States and plans for inter-Korean cooperation with South Korea.

"I hope Putin makes clear that Russia is ready to support a deal, but first you need a deal,” Alexander Vershbow, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center on Strategy and Security in Washington, told The Washington Post, referring to hopes for a U.S.-North Korea denuclearization deal.

• As The Post’s Jeanna Whalen reports, Kim is likely to seek Russia’s help in easing U.N. sanctions during his summit. Whelan notes that coal exports that violate these sanctions and help finance the country’s nuclear weapons program are on the rise, in part through a complicated system of ships. One known as the “White Honest,” was caught in Indonesian waters with a Sierra Leone flag last year:

"North Korea conducts its illicit trading with a fleet of ghost ships that paint false names on their hulls, steal identification numbers from other vessels and execute their trades via ship-to-ship transfers at sea, to avoid prying eyes at ports.

“In the case of the Wise Honest, a globe-trotting North Korean salesman arranged the shipment by holding meetings at Pyongyang’s embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia — and then paid an Indonesian broker through bank transfers facilitated by JPMorgan Chase, according to bank documents and other evidence gathered by the monitors.

“While the interception of the Wise Honest initially looked like a victory for enforcement, Indonesia recently defied U.N. monitors’ instructions to seize the coal, allowing it to be transferred to another vessel that promptly set sail for Malaysia, Griffiths said. He called this a ‘clear violation’ of sanctions and has asked Malaysia to investigate. Indonesian and Malaysian officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.”

• Ahead of Trump’s own state visit to Britain this June, there are some signs of trouble. The Post’s John Wagner reports:

"A day after accepting an invitation from Queen Elizabeth II for a state visit to Britain, President Trump on Wednesday promoted a baseless accusation that the United Kingdom had helped the Obama administration spy on his 2016 presidential campaign.

“Taking to Twitter, Trump cited a report, attributed to the conservative One America News Network, that cited an accusation of British spying made by Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and blogger who has spurred controversies over other false claims as well.

“‘WOW! It is now just a question of time before the truth comes out, and when it does, it will be a beauty!’ Trump wrote.

“The spying claim was roundly denied by U.S. and British intelligence officials when it surfaced two years ago.”

As Wagner notes, Britain’s main intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters, dismissed the claim again, dubbing it “nonsense” in a new statement.

• So, Trump’s next visit to London looks set to be as awkward for everyone involved as last time (even the orange diaper-wearing baby blimp is making a reappearance). But will it be any different than last time? Well, the Guardian’s Hadley Freeman sees one positive in the new date, in that Melania Trump is coming this time too:

"The truth is, the Trumps, with their visible mutual loathing, are like a satire on the anachronistic expectations about how a First Family should look and I, for one, have high hopes about Melania ending them once and for all on this trip, as she whacks Trump’s hand away outside Windsor Castle. And when that happens, we can definitively say this state visit was totally worth it.”

Amal Clooney speaks during a Security Council meeting on sexual violence at United Nations headquarters on April 23. (Seth Wenig/AP)</p>
Amal Clooney speaks during a Security Council meeting on sexual violence at United Nations headquarters on April 23. (Seth Wenig/AP)

Really?

When Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, and Nadia Murad, an Iraqi Yazidi were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last October for their work to stop the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war, there was widespread praise from all parts of the world, including the United States. But when the Trump administration was asked this month to do its part, and to pass a U.N. resolution to end sexual violence in war, things suddenly looked a bit more complicated.

Yes, the U.N. Security Council passed that resolution, but only in a watered-down version, diluted by the Trump administration. European allies are furious. They’ve grown accustomed to a U.S. administration with interests that are often diametrically opposed to theirs, including on trade, Iran and the European Union. But sexual violence in war?

The move to weaken Tuesday’s resolution followed weeks of U.S. objections to remove all references in that paper to reproductive and sexual health, which the U.S. delegation feared would be understood as support for abortions.

In practice, this could give nations accused of committing or backing such violence a pretext to justify a lack of progress in supporting victims. Also removed from the final resolution were references to expanded U.N. monitoring that would keep track of violations of the resolution. That could mean that perpetrators will have to fear less international scrutiny than originally planned.

The United States wasn’t alone in its opposition to the original resolution: Potentially encouraged by the U.S. move, China and Russia threatened to join the protest, even though both had previously supported or abstained from similar resolutions in the U.N. General Assembly. After the references to reproductive health were removed at U.S. request, both nations abstained on Tuesday, and the resolution passed 13-0.

The approved resolution still supports measures to end the use of sex as a weapon of war, some U.S. allies suggested that the country’s objections were threatening the dignity of women worldwide.

And the U.S. resistance appeared especially contradictory for an administration that has often portrayed itself as championing the rights of Yazidi women, who have faced sexual violence by the Islamic State in recent years. Human rights groups argue the move sends the wrong message, after decades in which sexual violence has become a more systematically used weapon of war. — Rick Noack

For more on Sri Lanka, a piece in the Atlantic notes how the attacks show that the Islamic State is using language to broaden its reach, and one in Foreign Policy points out the multiple warnings that could have prevented the attacks. Meanwhile, an op-ed in The Post calls for the U.N. secretary general to speak out more strongly against human rights abuses, and one in the Guardian calls attention to new legislation in Congress that could help undocumented migrants, brought to the country as children, stay in America. 

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Fire and ice

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