We woke on Easter morning to find emails from family on the other side of the world and brief items on our mobile phone feeds from CNN and the Washington Post about horrific, wide-spread and orchestrated violence in Sri Lanka which, while we had been sleeping, had killed more than 200 people and injured more than twice that number. Having visited that nation just five weeks earlier, we were stunned, and immediately turned on the television for more information.
Our first stop was MSNBC, which led with the Sri Lanka tragedy, but turned to a correspondent in Ireland — 5,000 miles away — for the story. The reporter devoted most of his time to talking about Christianity’s recent troubles (the Irish love that word), including the destruction of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris six days earlier and the on-going sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church worldwide.
So we turned to our favorite “CBS Sunday Morning,” which made the violence in Sri Lanka the lead subject of its brief news section at the top of the show. But, the CBS reporter was not on-site either — but in India. That evening for “Sixty Minutes,” CBS still did not have a reporter on the ground in Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka is not on the radar of western media, and that’s a psychological wound the country has carried for many decades, and adds to its frequent suffering.
When the tsunami of 2004 killed more people in Sri Lanka than any other country except Indonesia — and five times as many people as in Thailand — Sri Lankans bristled — and they still do — that Thailand received the media’s attention while Sri Lanka’s far more extensive death and destruction received little notice.
When 100,000 people died during a quarter century of civil strife in Sri Lanka, which “ended” in 2009, the tragedy was not a story in the western world. At first, the war in Southeast Asia, which the USA got in the middle of, pushed other wars out of western news. But even later, Sri Lanka’s civil war was not news in America.
Easter’s violence could be different. With Christian worship services and Easter Sunday brunches the apparent targets of suicide bombings, the West may finally pay attention to this pear-shaped nation the size of Indiana rubbing up against the southeast coast of India. Futhermore, because of the scope and coordination of the bombings, it is suspected that forces outside Sri Lanka assisted a local extremist group.
The potential for violence had been brought to the attention of some top government authorities and security forces several weeks earlier, allowing Sri Lankan police to locate and arrest two dozen suspects before the dead had even been fully tallied, but raising serious questions as to why authorities did not act more promptly and prevent the carnage.
I’m grateful that we were so recently able to explore the southwest quadrant of Sri Lanka. From its gorgeous coastline to its graceful hill country, we found the nation to be warm and welcoming. The only danger we felt was when an oncoming bus was in our lane of traffic and bearing down on our tiny rental car.
We saw ethnic and religious diversity, of course, but no sign of the politicized factions and friction that this tiny country cannot seem to escape and about which we heard so little in western media……until now, tragically.
JER
ALL OVER THE MAP 