2019年经济学人 斯里兰卡连环爆炸袭击(1)（在线收听）

Leaders

《社论》

Sri Lanka

斯里兰卡

Easter evil

复活节恶魔

The bombers wanted to provoke a clash of civilisations. Don’t fall into their trap

炸弹袭击者想挑起一场文明冲突，不要落入圈套。

A few months ago National Thowheed Jamath (NTJ), an Islamist group from Sri Lanka, was known for little more than defacing statues of the Buddha. On April 21st nine of its members walked into churches and luxury hotels on the island and blew themselves up, killing more than 350 people. Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility for the deadliest set of terrorist attacks in Asia in modern times. 

几个月前，斯里兰卡的伊斯兰极端组织NTJ以毁坏佛像而闻名。4月21日，9名 NTJ 成员走进岛上的教堂和豪华酒店，引爆了自己，造成350多人死亡。伊斯兰国宣称现代亚洲最致命的一系列恐怖袭击事件都与其有关。

How could this happen? Start with Sri Lanka’s bungling. The world has learned a great deal about how to thwart terrorists since September 11th 2001. A crucial lesson is that it is vital to share information quickly and widely, so that fragmentary intelligence can be pieced together and followed up. This is precisely what Sri Lanka’s government failed to do, despite receiving unusually detailed warnings. Part of the reason for that appears to be shameless politicking. The island’s president, Maithripala Sirisena, has been at loggerheads with the prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, since the former tried to sack the latter in October. Mr Wickremesinghe has been excluded from meetings of the national security council since then.

这种事是怎么发生的？要从斯里兰卡的混乱说起。自2001年911事件之后，世界在如何挫败恐怖分子方面就已经学到了很多。快速广泛地共享信息至关重要，这样就能将零碎的情报拼凑起来，跟踪追查，这是一个重要的经验教训。而斯里兰卡政府尽管收到了异样的情报警告，却并未做到这一点。部分原因似乎在于无耻的政治活动。因为去年10月，斯里兰卡总统迈特里帕拉·西里塞纳试图解雇总理拉尼尔·维克勒马辛哈，所以两人一直不和。西里塞纳从那时起就被排除在国家安全委员会的会议之外。

A second explanation is that, although Sri Lanka has no history of jihadist terrorism, nor even of much tension between Muslims and Christians, it sits in an ocean of bubbling extremism. In recent decades in South Asia, intolerant strands of Islam have edged out the broad-minded forms that used to predominate. That has created fertile ground for jihadists. The Maldives, just a short flight from Sri Lanka, sent more recruits to is in Iraq and Syria as a proportion of its population than any other country. Bangladesh, across the Bay of Bengal, has suffered a wave of Islamist attacks on secular activists and minorities in the past six years. Sri Lanka’s suicide-bombers reportedly contacted is veterans from both those countries. International jihadists have also cropped up across the Palk Strait in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which is bound to northern Sri Lanka by ethnic kinship. It was an is suspect arrested there who is said to have yielded some of the intelligence passed to Sri Lanka’s government (which was then ignored).

第二种解释是，尽管斯里兰卡没有圣战恐怖主义的历史，甚至穆斯林和基督徒之间也没有多少紧张关系，但它却处于极端主义的海洋之中。近几十年来，南亚一些不宽容的伊斯兰派别排挤了过去占主导地位且包容的宗教形式。这为圣战分子提供了沃土。马尔代夫距离斯里兰卡只有很短的飞行距离，它向伊拉克和叙利亚伊斯兰国派遣的新成员占该国人口的比例超过了其他任何国家。孟加拉湾对岸的孟加拉国，在过去6年里遭受了一波针对世俗活动人士和少数民族的伊斯兰主义袭击。据报道，斯里兰卡的自杀式炸弹袭击者和来自这两个国家的退伍军人有关。国际圣战者也在印度泰米尔纳德邦的帕尔克海峡出现。在那里一名伊斯兰国嫌疑人被捕，据说他传递给斯里兰卡政府一些情报(后被忽视)。