Sat 16 November 2019:
Gunmen in Sri Lanka have fired on buses transporting Muslims to cast their ballots in the presidential election, fuelling fears that minorities are being targeted to stop them voting.
Police officials confirmed that the buses, which were carrying hundreds of Muslim residents from the northwest town of Puttalam, were hit on Saturday morning when attackers burnt tyres on the road and set up makeshift roadblocks to ambush the convoy of more than 100 vehicles.
“The gunmen opened fire and also pelted stones,” said a police official in Tantirimale, 150 miles north of the capital Colombo. “At least two buses were hit, but we have no reports of casualties.”
The Muslim group were travelling to the neighbouring district of Mannar, where they were registered to vote.
There were also reports of a heavy military presence and unauthorised roadbloacks in Jaffna, northern Sri Lanka, which is home to the majority of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority.
Sri Lanka’s presidential election is taking place just seven months on from the Easter Sunday attacks. In the aftermath, there has been a surge of attacks, harassment and boycotts on Sri Lanka’s Muslim community, who make up 9% of the population.
There are a record 35 candidates running in the election but the race is between Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the brother of the former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, running for the SLPP, the Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalist party, and Sajith Premadasa, a minister in the current United National party (UNP) government.
The presidential contest between Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Sajith Premadasa is predicted to be extremely tight and the minority Tamils and Muslims are seen as crucial to swinging the vote.
The Rajapaksa brothers are revered by Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese Buddhist majority for defeating the Tamil Tiger rebels in 2009. Because of their heavy-handed rule during and after the war, some minorities fear their return.
“There is a concerted effort to keep the Muslims away from the ballot box,” Ratnajeevan Hoole, a member of the Elections Commission, told The Associated Press while heading to northwest Sri Lanka to speak with the Muslim voters who came under attack.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether any of the attackers had been arrested.
Hoole said he had called for the arrest of a former top Tamil rebel commander in the east now in alliance with Rajapaksa for making inflammatory comments against Muslims in the run-up to the election, but his request was not heeded.
The ex-rebel commander Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan broke away from the Tamil Tigers in 2004 and worked with the government to defeat the rebel group. His split helped the government end a 26-year separatist insurgency.
Hoole said that in videos posted on social media, Vinayagamoorthi Muralitharan, also known as Karuna Amman, had talked about the need to suppress the Muslim vote to undermine Muslims’ growing influence in Sri Lanka’s Eastern province.
Muslim convoy
Premadasa’s supporters organized the convoy of Muslims who had fled their homes in the northern district of Mannar in 1982, when the Tamil insurgency began to grow. A large number of Muslims also were evicted from the north in 1990.
The Elections Commission had encouraged them to register as voters in Mannar but had not arranged enough transportation to bring them from their homes in the northwestern district of Puttalam, Gajanayake, from the election monitoring group, said.
Nearly 16 million of the 22 million people were eligible to vote and choose a new president from a record 35 candidates. President Maithripala Sirisena, who was elected in 2015, is not seeking reelection. Results are expected as early as Sunday.
A decade of peace following nearly 30 years of civil war was shattered earlier this year when homegrown militants pledging loyalty to the Islamic State group detonated suicide bombs at three churches and three hotels on April 21. Rajapaksa, 71, cast himself as the only candidate capable of protecting Sri Lankans from such attacks.
The Muslim community have expressed particular concern about the election of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who has run on a strident security agenda and has the backing of the nationalist Buddhist groups responsible for stoking anti-Muslim sentiment and violence in recent years. As a result, it is predicted that Muslims will mainly throw their votes behind Sajith Premadasa and the UNP.
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