The Two Sons of Kattankudy: A Sri Lankan Town Gives Rise to a Terrorist and a Peacebuilder
In the days following the Easter bombings across Sri Lanka, the world turned its gaze to Kattankudy to understand how this coastal town of 45,000 people had given rise to Zaharan Hashim, the man who led the attacks. The portrait which emerged is woefully incomplete: this Muslim town did not just give rise to a terrorist but also to a peacebuilder.
Hashim had founded the previously unknown National Thowheeth Jama’ath which carried out the ISIS-inspired attack, killing over 250 people and bringing the country to its knees, sparking widespread fear that there would be retaliatory violence which could spiral out of control. In the month since, there have been attacks on Muslims; a mosque and over 500 shops were burned, at least one person was killed, and reports of public harassment are widespread. The broad brush used to characterize Sri Lanka’s only Muslim town, as a breeding ground for terrorism has contributed to the anti-Islam sentiments.
Nawaz Mohammed is another son of Kattankudy. He grew up there during the war and emerged to dedicate his adult life to preventing violence and helping his fellow citizens come to grips with the memory of the devastating war which ripped apart his homeland and his family. His story should be celebrated as an integral part of how we understand Kattankudy.
Nawaz is a country director for the peacebuilding organization, Search for Common Ground. In 2010, the year after Sri Lanka’s government defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in a brutal civil war which claimed the lives of well over 60,000 people, Nawaz set up the first Search program in the country. “I felt that this is where I want to contribute,” he said. “Why do we have these divisions? Why do we have this polarization? How can we move forward as a nation?”
I am also on the staff of Search for Common Ground, and when I was the organization’s Asia Regional Director I worked closely with Nawaz on his mission to bring long-term peace to his beautiful and blighted island. Together with his team, Nawaz has spent the last decade knitting relationships among people who once saw each other as enemies, fostering reconciliation and healing among those who suffered the most during the war. Most powerfully, he worked with a group of dedicated friends who came together across ethnic and religious lines to create opportunities for people to share their own stories and to find ways to remember and own what had happened to them. In partnership with the courageous work of the Herstories project, they immortalized their memories in the national archives and shared them on the Memory Map, contributing to a collaborative archive of testimonies from the civil war.
In post-war Sri Lanka, this was courageous work. The government had crafted a ‘victor’s narrative,’ casting themselves as heroes, saviors of the nation who had vanquished an existential terrorist threat. “In a context like this,” Nawaz said, the accounts are always “the powerful’s narratives, the winner’s narratives.” As a result, “the stories of the ordinary people who have this wonderful resilience, this wonderful courage… those get missed.”
The program enabled people on all sides of the war to both speak and listen, to use their own words and to hear about the plights of those from different ethnic backgrounds. Through this process, they came to understand their collective suffering. “It’s a valuable thing,” he said, describing how people came to see their stories. “It’s a thing they own.”
Nawaz’s work is autobiographical, a natural outcome of his life growing up in the midst of a war. His story, and Kattankudy’s, are one and the same.
He is a devout Muslim, part of a community which suffered at the hands of both the government and the LTTE during the war. In recent years systemic persecution and a rise of anti-Muslim sentiment has led to pogroms in which Muslim shops were destroyed and their shopkeepers killed in Kandy and Aluthgama. His religious community, which makes up 10% of the nation’s population, lives in fear that these sentiments could boil over; the bombings have led to a wave of anti-Muslim propaganda and violence, brining deeply rooted prejudices to the surface. Today, everyone is on edge.
When Nawaz was 10 years old, his older brother disappeared from a small guest house in Colombo where he was a university student, caught up in the sweeps by the police in response to a leftist insurgency. Not long after, in 1990, his sister was killed by the LTTE in a massacre of 80 hajj pilgrims. “Even though we never saw her body or knew where she was buried,” Nawaz shared, the details that emerged convinced them that she was among the dead. “But with our brother, we never knew what happened to him.” Three of Nawaz’s uncles also were lost to the war, one shot and the other two abducted.
The suffering of the families of the disappeared is unfathomable. There is no closure, no chance to grieve, no opportunity to perform last rites, and no body to bury or cremate. “My mother, until she passed away three years ago, was still hoping and searching for her son,” Nawaz said. Those left behind face a chasm of grief, immeasurable and impossible to cross, and they are left searching endlessly.
So it has been for Nawaz, and he has summoned an inner strength of purpose. “In our memory work,” he said, “we let people to tell their story in their own words, in the way they want to tell their stories.” He has allowed himself to do the same.
Nawaz’s family is still in Kattankudy. Normally, the main market street is bright and pulsating with merchants selling their wares, but after the bombings the town underwent a security sweep. “They are checking every house” Nawaz said at the time. “They are covering different parts of town. I am waiting for the 4 to 5 hours-long home-to-home security check by the armed forces.”
“[The] identity of my community and the name of my town are seen with fear and suspicion,” he added. “The terrorists killed dignity and safety of [the] Muslim community along with those suicide bomb victims.”
“We have been here before. This blooded precipice is familiar, this looming abyss,” Sri Lankan writer Tisaranee Gunasekara wrote in Groundviews in the days after the Easter bombing. The potential for spiraling violence looms, and in the face of rising communal violence, Sri Lanka will continue confronting the challenge of weaving together its fractured society. “The current joint efforts by [the] state with the Muslim community in ensuring security needs to be accompanied by joint efforts to build reconciliation and coexistence for any sustainable peace and security,” Nawaz shared.
Whatever happens, Nawaz Mohammed’s work will sit at the nexus between a vicious past and an unknown future. From his pain, Nawaz has blazed a path for Sri Lanka where Tamils and Sinhalese, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and Muslims can all see each other’s suffering, understanding that it has come from the waves of conflict to sweep over their beloved island. This too can be Kattankudy’s legacy, its contribution to this stricken land, brought forth from one of the town’s most inspired sons.
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Michael Shipler is the Associate Vice President, Strategy and Program Quality at Search for Common Ground. Follow him on twitter @michaelshipler
