Easter Sunday 2019

Thursday, 10 December 2020, 3:17 pm
Article: Keith Rankin

I was in Victoria, Canada over Easter weekend in 2019. On Easter Sunday I returned to my hotel, to the shocking news of a set of coordinated suicide bombings in Colombo, Sri Lanka. 267 people died that day, and at least 500 others were injured. The target groups were Christian churchgoers, and western tourists. The perpetrators were jihadists. My immediate reaction was that this was utu for the Christchurch mosque shooting , just one month's earlier. My partner's reaction was the same.

To date, no other credible reason for the Easter Sunday massacre has come to light. Rather, I have heard nothing at all about the matter since returning to New Zealand in June 2019, neither in the New Zealand media nor the international media.

The important and obvious but often overlooked feature of the Christchurch 15 March terror attack was that this was an international event that happened to take place on New Zealand soil. The perpetrator was someone who belonged to an international community, and who played to an international audience. He happened to be living in New Zealand at the time, and New Zealand – for reasons perhaps more good than bad – represented a softish venue for such an atrocity. The terrorist's target group was also an international group, members of one of the largest faith communities in the world. From the terrorist's point of view the fact that many of the victims were citizens or permanent residents of New Zealand was incidental; so was the fact that almost certainly none of the people who would pray at those mosques that day had ever been perpetrators of violent crime. To the terrorist, they were simply members of a global target group who were relatively accessible.

These same comments are equally applicable to the Colombo bombings. In Sri Lanka, Islam is the third biggest faith group, and Christianity is the fourth biggest. Sri Lanka is no stranger to ethnic and sectarian violence, including suicide bombings; it's just that the violence has generally been between the two biggest ethnic/faith groups, the Buddhist Sinhalese and the Hindu Tamils. The small Christian community in Sri Lanka has never before been a focus there of group hate. This was an international event that happened upon Sri Lanka, and was able to happen there for the same reason that the Christchurch attack was able to take place in New Zealand; namely, Sri Lanka was just about the last place in the world that Christians would expect to be attacked because they were Christians.

By understanding both events as essentially global rather than national events, it makes perfect sense to understand one as being utu for the other.

We in New Zealand – because we are citizens of the world – should feel able to (indeed feel obliged to) express sympathy and condolences to the victims of the Sri Lanka massacre; just as we do towards the victims of the smaller event in Christchurch. While the jury may still be out on the precise motivation (or motivations) of the Sri Lankan jihadists, on the balance of probability the Colombo tragedy would not have happened if the Christchurch shootings a month earlier had not happened. 318 people – 310 innocent people – lost their lives. The good news is that no chain of revenge attacks was set in motion. RIP.

© Scoop Media

Keith Rankin

Political Economist, Scoop Columnist

Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s.

Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like.

Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.

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