| They're talking jihad against the Tamil Tigers. With allies like that, I'm not sure the government needs enemies. |
As violence rages between Sri Lanka's government and ethnic Tamil Tiger rebels, the island's Muslim minority says it is caught in the middle, and there is talk of an armed "Jihad" group emerging if war returns.The third-largest group on an island dominated by Sinhalese Buddhists, Sri Lanka's Muslims -- who share the language of the Hindu and Christian Tamil minority -- have long had a difficult relationship with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In the 1990s, the Tigers kicked thousands of Muslims out of the northern town of Jaffna, while in the east Muslim areas were attacked and dozens killed. In the town of Kattankudi, one of the mosques still bears the bullet damage from a 1990 massacre. "We can't live separately," says Mohammed Sharif Deen, 56, who survived the mosque attack by playing dead. "They have to come and work here, we have to go to their side and sell our things. But if war comes we will fight and then we will die." A 2002 ceasefire halted Sri Lanka's two-decade war after some 64,000 had died. But now violence has surged again, killing more than 700 people this year -- and again the Muslims, dominant in the island's business community, fear being dragged in.
The Tigers were blamed for a grenade attack on a mosque in November that killed several people, and there have been other smaller attacks. Some Muslims fear the Tigers see their community as standing in the way of its goal of a separate ethnic Tamil homeland.
With their businesses still recovering from the 2004 tsunami, which hit the east hard, most Muslims say they simply want peace. "We Muslims are not fighting," said 31-year-old fishing co-operative owner Kalender Bashir outside the ruins of his tsunami-damaged house. "But between the LTTE and the government we are caught in the crossfire."