Easter truth can be the beginning

There has long been speculation that the Easter bombing of April 2019 had a relationship to Sri Lankan politics.

- BY JEHAN PERERA

The near simultaneous bombings of three Christian churches and three luxury hotels, with a death toll of 270 and over 500 injured, by Muslim suicide bombers made no sense in Sri Lanka where there has been no history of conflict between the two religions. But a political motivation was suspected on the basis of who would be the beneficiary of an otherwise senseless crime. The bombing immediately discredited the government in power at that time, saw the nomination of the opposition presidential candidate soon after, and paved the way for the crushing defeat of the government at the national elections that followed in a few months.

In Parliament last week, Leader of the House Bimal Ratnayake revealed a political strategy to create the conditions for the change of government that took place. His remarks corresponded to suspicions that the attack was not just a failure of intelligence, but the result of deliberate manipulation by those in the political sphere. What is new is that these suspicions are now being stated clearly and officially at the highest level of government. Minister Ratnayake said, “They started this in 2013 by creating and maintaining Sinhala and Muslim extremist groups through intelligence agencies. The culmination of this was similar to the Cambridge Analytica incident.”

The Cambridge Analytica scandal involved the unauthorised harvesting of personal data from millions of Facebook users to build psychological profiles and micro-target voters for political purposes. The data harvested by Cambridge Analytica was used primarily to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election in favour of Donald Trump and the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK. The company also allegedly worked on elections in Kenya, Nigeria, India, Trinidad and Tobago, and several other countries, using psychographic profiling and targeted digital ads to manipulate voter behaviour.

Cardinal’s Consistency