Translocations: A Qualitative Exploration of Inter-Ethnoreligious Relations Among Sri Lanka's Diaspora During an Era of Social Media-Mobilized ...
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Translocations: A Qualitative Exploration
of Inter-Ethnoreligious Relations Among
Sri Lanka’s Diaspora During an Era
of Social Media-Mobilized Violence
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Citation Wijayaratne, Sandhira. 2020. Translocations: A Qualitative
Exploration of Inter-Ethnoreligious Relations Among Sri Lanka’s
Diaspora During an Era of Social Media-Mobilized Violence. Doctoral
dissertation, Harvard Medical School.
Citable link https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37364909
Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH
repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions
applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http://
nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-
use#LAAScholarly Report submitted in partial fulfillment of the MD Degree at Harvard Medical School
8 May 2020
Sandhira Wijayaratne, BA
Translocations: A Qualitative Exploration of Inter-Ethnoreligious Relations among Sri Lanka’s
Diaspora during an Era of Social Media-Mobilized Violence
Mentor: Dr. Kasisomayajula Viswanath
Lee Kum Kee Professor of Health Communication, Department of Social and Behavioral
Sciences, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health
Professor of Health Communication, Population Sciences, Medical Oncology, Dana-Farber
Cancer Institute
Associated Publication: Wijayaratne S. After the Violence. Journal of Religion & Health.
2020;59(1):428-430.
1Abstract
Title:
Translocations: A Qualitative Exploration of Inter-Ethnoreligious Relations among Sri Lanka’s
Diaspora during an Era of Social Media-Mobilized Violence
Purpose:
Sri Lanka has a history of ethnoreligious discord leading to large-scale violence, primarily
erupting in the country’s civil war fought along ethnic lines, ending in 2009. Subsequently,
persistent frictions have lingered between the country’s ethnoreligious groups, historically
between Sinhalese and Tamils, and most recently against Muslims and Christians. Social media
has exacerbated these tensions through the dissemination of disinformation, rumors, and hate
speech. Such social media platforms have been used both by communities living in Sri Lanka as
well as diaspora Sri Lankans. To better understand and frame the beliefs and actions of Sri
Lanka’s ethnoreligious groups, this study engages members of the Sri Lankan diaspora in North
America to explore issues around ethnoreligious biases, exposure to violence or natural
disaster, awareness of mental illness, and social media usage.
Methods:
Members of the Sri Lankan diaspora were recruited through correspondence with faith
institutions and community leaders. Six members were recruited for four interviews, which
represented Sinhalese, Tamil, Burgher, and Moor ethnicities, and Muslim, Christian, Hindu, and
Buddhist religions. Through semi-structured individual and group interviews, diaspora members
answered questions about their perceptions of the situation in Sri Lanka and how it relates to
the situation in their diaspora Sri Lankan communities, particularly around the issues of
ethnoreligious biases, exposure to violence or natural disaster, awareness of mental illness, and
social media usage. The interviews were recorded and transcribed. The interview transcripts
were analyzed for shared and conflicting themes across participants.
2Results:
Interviewees represented a mix of opinions regarding the content and form through which
ethnoreligious tensions are being felt today. The majority of participants use social media and
are aware of how it has been utilized to spread disinformation against minority groups in the
recent past. All participants know of individuals affected by physical trauma related to Sri
Lanka’s history, but not all were aware of mental illness within their communities. Many
responses reflected each other across ethnoreligious lines, but each from a particular angle.
Conclusions:
Despite sharing commonalities in viewpoints across different ethnoreligious groups in Sri
Lanka’s diaspora, more dialogue is needed between groups to meaningfully untangle tensions.
News shared through family and social media is not necessarily regarded as accurate. Less
stigma around mental illness and more insight into how Sri Lanka’s history and culture have
contributed to poor mental health are needed.
3Table of Contents
ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................................................ 2
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................... 5
STUDENT ROLE ................................................................................................................................................... 12
METHODS .......................................................................................................................................................... 13
RESULTS ............................................................................................................................................................. 14
DISCUSSION ....................................................................................................................................................... 15
ETHNORELIGIOUS BIAS ................................................................................................................................................. 15
NEWS GATHERING AND SOCIAL MEDIA USAGE ................................................................................................................. 17
EXPOSURE TO VIOLENCE/DISASTER................................................................................................................................. 20
MENTAL HEALTH ........................................................................................................................................................ 21
LIMITATIONS ...................................................................................................................................................... 24
CONCLUSIONS .................................................................................................................................................... 25
SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE WORK ..................................................................................................................... 25
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................................................................................................................ 27
WORKS CITED..................................................................................................................................................... 28
TABLE 1. DEMOGRAPHIC DETAILS OF INTERVIEW PARTICIPANTS ....................................................................... 32
APPENDICES ....................................................................................................................................................... 33
APPENDIX A: INDIVIDUAL SEMI-STRUCTURED INTERVIEW GUIDE .......................................................................................... 33
APPENDIX B: GROUP SEMI-STRUCTURED INTERVIEW GUIDE ................................................................................................ 35
4Introduction:
In 2009, Sri Lanka ended a quarter century-long civil war waged largely between its ethnic
majority Sinhalese-Buddhist government and minority Tamil rebels based in the north of the
country. Though the war formally began in 1983 as an effort to separate the northern part of
the island—predominantly populated by the nation’s Tamil minority—from the rest of Sri
Lanka, its roots dig deeper into policies and sentiments brewing since before Sri Lanka won
independence from Great Britain in 1948. In particular, divisions between Tamil and Sinhalese
Sri Lankans emerged and grew under British rule. After independence, majority Sinhalese
government institutions favored “Sinhalese-only” policies that discriminated against Tamils in
terms of enfranchisement, job opportunities, and language (Feith, 2010), largely reacting
against colonial era policies that were perceived to have favored Tamils (Soherwordi, 2010).
Several decades of these tensions and intermittent violence provided the build-up that
ultimately escalated to civil war. A group called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or
the Tamil Tigers) emerged among other Tamil rebel groups in the north of the country
(Subramanian, 2014), and came into conflict with the Sri Lankan government starting in 1983, in
a push for Tamil independence. The two sides waged a war lasting twenty-six years, involving
suicide bombs carried out by the Tamil Tigers (Waldman, 2003) and excess military force by the
Sri Lankan army (United Nations-Secretary General, 2011), with estimates of total casualties to
be as high as 80,000 to 100,000 overall (Hull, et al, 2009), including more than 40,000 during
the last several weeks (United Nations-Secretary General, 2011).
In the near-decade since the war’s end, peace between Sinhalese and Tamil groups has been
somewhat contentious, but devoid of the large-scale conflict that defined it in the years prior to
2009. Military occupation of Tamil lands has continued a decade after the war ended (Human
Rights Watch, 2018). More than twenty thousand Tamils who disappeared during the war,
whose families have been pushing the government for answers, have only recently been
announced by politicians to be deceased (Wallen, 2020). During the country’s most recent
independence day, government ceremonies only sang the national anthem in Sinhala,
contradictory to precedent where the song was sung in both Sinhala and Tamil, an official
5language of Sri Lanka (Associated Press, 2020). These behaviors allude to the social fabric on
which the war was mounted—namely Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalism—which continues to this
day. Some argue this phenomenon is also the source of Sri Lanka’s violence against another
minority: its Muslim population. One commentator rationalized, “Once the war against the
[Tamil rebels] was over, it was almost as if Sinhala-Buddhist extremism, which conflates religion
with territory and language, needed a new enemy. Muslims have emerged as that enemy, the
rise of Islamist terrorism providing a convenient handle with which to demonise the
community” (Subramanian, 2018).
In 2014, after an alleged incident between a Sinhalese-Buddhist monk and Sri Lankan Muslims,
a hardline Sinhalese-Buddhist group called Bodu Bala Sena held a rally in Aluthgama that
amounted to a declaration that the country belonged primarily to Sinhalese-Buddhists. The rally
ultimately led to mob violence against Muslims later that day, resulting in “four people…killed,
including a Tamil security guard, and 80 others injured, the majority being from the Muslim
community. Over 60 homes and businesses were set on fire in the two days while several
mosques were also damaged” (Colombage, 2014). Additionally, 10,000 people were displaced
(Karunarathne, 2014). An investigation by a non-partisan policy organization within the country
found that social media profiles began posting hate speech against Muslims starting about two
years prior to these attacks (Samaratunge, et al, 2014).
In 2018, one particular social media post claimed that thousands of “sterilization pills” had been
confiscated by Sri Lankan police from a Muslim pharmacist (Taub, et al, 2018). There was no
evidence for the post’s claims, but it inspired rumors on social media that Muslims were
reportedly carrying out a campaign to sterilize Sinhalese-Buddhists. Around this time, a Tamil-
speaking Muslim food vendor in Ampara was confronted by Sinhalese-speaking customers
when one in their party purportedly found something in their food. Suspecting the object to be
a sterilization pill, the Sinhalese crowd surrounded the vendor and taped on cell phones his
response to their questions in Sinhalese about whether or not he had put sterilization pills in
their food. The vendor, not able to speak Sinhalese well and fearful of further agitation,
6generally just agreed with whatever was being said—though it appeared that he may have
been unclear to what exactly he was agreeing. Mobs eventually attacked him and his
restaurant. The video from that incident was sent around social media as proof that there was a
Muslim-led plot to sterilize Sinhalese-Buddhists, further stoking flames online. After a Sinhalese
truck driver was beaten to death in a separate incident, this video of the food vendor
augmented further anger that Muslims were attempting to rise against the Sinhalese
community. The funeral for the victim was in a town called Digana, which was attended by
Sinhalese-Buddhists who then reportedly used social media to plan violence against Muslim
communities after the procession. In a period of three days, several Muslim shops, mosques,
and houses were burned by mobs. At least one person died. The government issued a ten-day
state of emergency and shut down most social media channels. Violence subsided somewhat
after those actions were taken.
On Easter 2019, multiple suicide bombings in churches and hotels across Sri Lanka resulted in
more than 250 dead and 500 injured (Bastians, et al, 2019). Investigations found the
perpetrators to be local Muslim individuals affiliated with the Islamic State. After the attacks,
the Sri Lankan government shut down social media sites, including Facebook, fearing a return to
anti-Muslim violence (Hassan, et al, 2019). Local Muslim leaders immediately denounced the
attacks. Three years prior to the bombings, these same Muslim leaders had warned authorities
about some of the individuals who would later carry out the bombings (Marlow, 2019), which
were believed to be ignored. Despite the social media shutdown and the cooperation of Muslim
leaders, reprisal violence against Muslim communities took place (Ulmer, 2019). The Buddhist
monk who had instigated violence against Muslims in 2014 was released from prison after the
bombings (Reuters, 2019), purportedly because the attacks corroborated his views against
Muslims. A hunger strike by another Buddhist monk, in addition to other internal pressures,
forced Muslim members of Parliament to resign (Bastians, 2019). Many commentators suggest
that the tragic bombings have unleashed a new wave of Islamophobia and minority stigma
rooted in Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalism.
7In November 2019, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the Defense Secretary at the end of the civil war, won
national elections and became the new President of Sri Lanka (Al Jazeera, 2019). He has been
accused of war crimes due to reported actions during the war’s conclusion, including
“overseeing torturing and indiscriminate killings of both civilians and combatants, and later of
political assassinations,” as well as “condoning sexual violence and extrajudicial killings
allegedly by Lankan security forces during the war” (Press Trust of India, 2019). His brother and
former president during the civil war, Mahinda Rajapaksa, was selected by Gotabaya to become
the current Prime Minister (Al Jazeera, 2019). In late February 2020, the Sri Lankan government
announced that it would withdraw itself from a United Nations Human Rights Council
resolution investigating war crimes toward the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war (Associated Press,
2020), when the two Rajapaksa brothers were previously in power.
Given the active tensions involving Sri Lanka’s ethnoreligious groups amid the return of
government leaders known for their repression, a project engaging Sri Lankans directly on the
island might prove to be harmful and ineffective. This project aims to avoid such ethical and
practical dilemmas by instead focusing on the Sri Lankan diaspora located in North America.
Interviews and conversations with ethnoreligious groups within these diaspora populations
could serve as a proxy for understanding ethnoreligious tensions in Sri Lanka. Specifically,
Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey in the United States, as well as Toronto in Canada,
have fairly robust populations of many different kinds of Sri Lankans from virtually every
ethnoreligious group. These diaspora populations still bear tight connections with Sri Lanka,
and thus, reflect many of the biases that specific ethnoreligious groups have against each other.
By targeting these populations, one would still be able to capture many of the thoughts,
feelings, and experiences of different Sri Lankan ethnoreligious groups, but without the
immediacy and danger that might plague such conversations directly in Sri Lanka right now.
Secondly, diaspora populations bear major influence on cultural dynamics within Sri Lanka,
often exalted within their families still on the island; their beliefs and biases frequently sway,
moderate, and represent politics within Sri Lanka. Lastly, diaspora populations often rely on
8social media quite heavily to stay in touch with the island; therefore, analyzing their
interpretation and engagement of social media will be illustrative.
Tapping into Sri Lanka’s diaspora might also better scope the Sri Lankan community’s fraught
understanding of mental health. Since the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, the mental illness
burden within the country has risen from 1,492.07 disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) per
100,000 population in 2009 to 1,513.94 DALYs per 100,000 population in 2017 (IHME, 2019).
For Sri Lanka’s population between 15 and 49 years old in 2017, self-harm was the greatest
cause of death and DALYs lost (IHME, 2019). The most recent Sri Lanka Demographic and
Health Survey in 2016 was also the first to record findings of mental illness within the country.
They found that 0.7 percent of the population was undergoing any treatment for a mental
health condition, with higher percentages among poorer populations (Sri Lanka DHS, 2016, p
233-234). Among those undergoing mental health treatment, 36.5 percent experienced
depression, 16.6 percent experienced psychosis, 6.9 percent experienced anxiety, and 4.3
percent experienced bipolar disorder (Sri Lanka DHS, 2016, p 235). Given the stigmatization of
mental illness within Sri Lanka, and the cross-cultural discrepancies in how mental illness is
perceived, these numbers may be under-representations of the true mental illness burden on
the island. Sri Lanka as a country bears numerous risk factors that could explain its mental
illness burden, including the traumas of experiencing the civil war and the 2004 tsunami,
poverty, and post-colonialism. Some have suggested that the cumulative effect of these
exposures likely informs the nation’s mental illness burden (Somasundaram, 2014). Thus, Sri
Lankans as a whole, and likely its diaspora population, bear some burden of mental illness or
have community members affected by it. Overall, the literature on the mental health of Sri
Lankan diaspora populations is quite scant. While some have focused on mental illness
conception among Sri Lankan migrants (Pandalangat, et al, 2013), there is a dearth of data
measuring mental illness burden within Sri Lankan diaspora sub-populations. As we attempt to
assess the diaspora community’s awareness of mental illness within their specific
ethnoreligious communities, we may be able to delineate an issue deeply entrenched and
largely ignored within Sri Lanka, but perhaps slightly less marginalized in North America.
9Additionally, we may better paint a demographic map in understanding whether certain
ethnoreligious communities are more impacted by mental illness than others. By documenting
some form of mental health impact secondary to trauma, we hope we could lay the foundation
for a broad discussion that seems to be lacking within the Sri Lankan community as a
composite.
Similarly, focusing the study population on the Sri Lankan diaspora enables a safer and franker
environment to gauge how Sri Lankans use and interpret social media. In the case of Sri Lanka,
a government shutdown of Facebook and other messaging applications coupled with a state of
emergency helped to halt social media-fueled mob violence against Muslims in 2018 (Reuters,
2018). Facebook has vowed to do better (Roose, et al, 2018) and to review and strengthen
policies that led to its ultimate abuse. While acknowledging that future actions (or lack thereof)
by local communities will play some role in the absence or re-eruption of violence precipitated
through social media, formal investigation is needed to unpack the situational realities that
enabled such intercommunal flames to be fanned by these applications in the first place. With
the high likelihood that social media will be used in the present and future to mobilize violence
in Sri Lanka and elsewhere, understanding these tensions and identifying interventions or ways
to de-escalate their rise will be imperative.
Among diaspora communities, social media has often been used as a tool for emigrants from Sri
Lanka to remain connected to issues on the homeland (Told, 2014). Throughout my personal
experience as a Sinhalese-Buddhist Sri Lankan American, social media posts on Facebook and
similar applications have helped narrow continent-wide distances with the click of a few
buttons. This has allowed keeping in touch with family and friends relatively easy, if not
instantaneous or face-to-face. However, during the events of 2018 and 2019, social media was
used to propagate slanderous misinformation that was forwarded, liked, and followed—
resulting in real life consequences for those it was targeting. These posts went viral among my
own social media circles, which included Sri Lankan diaspora social media users. This usage
among the diaspora reflects the two-sided nature that social media has come to embody: a
10close-to-home feeling of the community diasporic populations left, but also the susceptibility to
believe and propagate misinformation striking at decades-long intercommunal tensions that
cannot be verified from thousands of miles away. While there have not been reports that Sri
Lankan diaspora populations were intentionally trying to stoke the violence seen on the island
over the last couple years, the vehemence with which these rumors were believed in my own
social media circles suggests some form of participation in the mobilization of these rumors.
Elsewhere, there have been reports of diaspora populations intentionally using social media as
a political tool to incite violence back home, as in Ethiopia in 2018 (Jeffrey, 2018). Formally
understanding the extent to which Sri Lanka’s diaspora populations engage with social media
within the framework of their own life experiences and biases may help to uncover the
disconnected relationships various ethnoreligious groups may have with each other.
Though previous work has examined the use of publicly documented hate speech as a tool for
violence (Russell Sage Foundation, 2018), there is an extreme dearth in the empirical literature
examining social media’s augmentation of hate and false speech that ultimately ends in large-
scale violence. The Centre for Policy Alternatives out of Colombo has produced incredible work
analyzing and translating social media posts, but only with limited ethnographic detail about
the determinants of majority-minority relations in Sri Lanka today (Samaratunge et al, 2014). In
a similar line of thinking, in-depth understanding on the interpretation of motivation for social
media use as a vehicle of violence is lacking. Within the Sri Lanka diaspora context, such insight
appears to be quite minimal within the literature.
Qualitative, semi-structured interviews among diaspora populations could more concretely
uncover the fractures that exist between these communities, and how social media use could
widen them. Further, in-depth interviews could help identify individual-level observations in
social media interpretation, including how participants might accept, question, verify, or
discount specific content. Such findings could help build a body of knowledge to structure
guidelines to encourage “healthy” social media consumption, particularly during periods of
heightened ethnic tensions. Grounding this consumption with life experiences may empirically
11provide some rationale for why certain ethnoreligious groups adopt specific views. Similarly,
unveiling histories of mental health burden among these different populations may also yield
information as to why certain beliefs are held, and could be used as a tool for reconciliation if
different populations have similar mental health burdens amid parallel stories to tell. This more
granular analysis might contribute to possible strategies to diffuse tensions exacerbated on
social media among other diaspora populations, as well as in Sri Lanka.
Student Role:
As the principal investigator of this study, I formulated the study design with Dr. Viswanath, an
expert in health communication based at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Dana
Farber Cancer Institute. Together, we strategized an outreach sampling design of connecting
with faith-based and ethnic Sri Lankan-based diaspora organizations and/or community leaders
in the northeastern United States and Canada to recruit participants to interview. Since this
project fell under the guise and definition of human subjects research, I wrote an IRB proposal
and a subsequent modification, which eventually received exempt status. The IRB proposal
required standardized outreach documents and interview scripts, which I constructed (see
Appendices A and B). I performed this outreach and recruited participants to interview. After
recruitment, I obtained informed consent and interviewed participants via in-person interviews
or by phone. I recorded these interviews and later transcribed them, analyzing the interviews
for contrasting and parallel content among different ethnoreligious groups. Concurrently, I
wrote this Scholars in Medicine Report to analyze these findings.
Prior to formally beginning this research, I undertook several background activities, including
coursework, extracurricular activities, funding applications, and a publication to strengthen my
fund of knowledge and preparation prior to initiating this project. As part of the Harvard
Medical School-Doctor of Medicine curriculum, I took a required Advanced Integrated Science
Course (AISC) in Neurobiology in March 2019, where I focused my final project presentation—
which involved proposing a neuroscience experiment to test a hypothesis—on the
neurobiological basis on which social media exposure could result in racial bias. In the Fall of
122019, I took a Foundations of Global Mental Health course at the Harvard School of Public
Health, where my studies utilized a historical perspective in understanding Sri Lanka’s
ethnoreligious tensions and examined reconciliation-focused faith-based interventions to
lessen ethnoreligious discord. Also in the Fall of 2019, I took an Elementary Tamil course based
at the Harvard Cambridge campus through the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, with the aim of
developing Tamil language skills to better engage Sri Lankan Tamil populations. Throughout the
2019-2020 academic year, I was an Assembly Student Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for
Internet and Society at Harvard University, which focuses on the risks and challenges of online
disinformation; working with other students from other Harvard schools, I am participating in a
project examining the form and substance that health-related online disinformation could take.
When this project was originally designed with the intention of exploring these questions in Sri
Lanka, I applied for some funding through the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute
based at Harvard University; after the Easter 2019 bombings, Dr. Viswanath and I decided
asking these questions within Sri Lanka might put participants at risk and might prevent
individuals from wanting to be interviewed, so we decided to ask these questions of diaspora
populations instead, which necessitated forgoing the funding. Additionally, after the Easter
2019 bombings, I wrote a perspective article on the potential mental health consequences of
the violence amid Sri Lanka’s history of war and natural disasters (Wijayaratne, 2019).
Methods:
Recruitment of participants was done via electronic outreach to Sri Lankan diaspora
organizations and/or their community leaders, based in the Massachusetts, New York, New
Jersey, and Toronto, Canada areas. Organizations included faith-based, ethnic-based, or Sri
Lankan diaspora-focused institutions and groups. Participants were recruited to represent Sri
Lanka’s major ethnic and religious groups among interview participants, including Tamil,
Burgher, Moor, and Sinhalese ethnicities, as well as Hindu, Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist
religions. In total, 18 community organizations and/or community leaders were contacted
electronically to recruit potential participants from their congregations/communities for semi-
structured interviews. Amid this outreach, six participants were recruited for interviews. The
13totality of the six participants represented all four of the major ethnicities and all four of the
major religions listed above. Four interviews in total were conducted: one in-person group
interview of three participants, and three individual interviews conducted by phone. The
interviews were audio-recorded, and subsequently transcribed. The transcriptions were de-
identified of information that might cause re-identification, including current geographic
location of participants within North America. They were also edited for clarity and content
related to the study topics. After transcription, the audio recordings were subsequently
deleted. The interview content was then analyzed to pull out themes that were similar or
different across the ethnoreligious groups represented.
Results:
Table 1 outlines the demographic details of the interview participants. A total of six interview
participants were recruited from the study region of the Northeastern United States and the
Toronto, Canada area. This group comprises a diaspora population representing each of the
major ethnic and religious groups in Sri Lanka, including Tamil, Sinhalese, Moor, and Burgher
ethnicities and Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, and Muslim religions. Though the interviewees were
limited in number, they conveyed perspectives unique not only to themselves but to friends,
family, and communities they interact with regularly. Overall, participants acknowledged that
their viewpoints deviated from the generation above them, who were more primarily affected
and had greater exposure to the ethnoreligious violence of the last three decades in Sri Lanka
before moving to North America. Interviews were analyzed for conflicting and reflective themes
related to the study questions.
Participants cited complexity regarding the state of current ethnoreligious relations in Sri Lanka,
with virtually all acknowledging that tensions exist between different communities, but some
believing those tensions to originate in the short term over the last couple years, while others
feeling that they are longstanding. When asked about potential actors responsible for poor
relations today, several stated the government, while others pointed to the island’s relationship
to China as a contributing factor. Several also mentioned the role of religion in creating and
14sustaining inter-ethnoreligious strife. Five of six participants use social media regularly, with the
majority being aware of disinformation and hate speech spread through various platforms.
Despite, this, participants acknowledge some benefits of social media usage for their specific
ethnoreligious groups. All participants cited knowing community members exposed to physical
trauma through the civil war, the 2004 tsunami, the 2019 Easter bombings, and other events.
Four of six participants were aware of mental illness in their communities, to varying degrees;
two outrightly linked such mental illness to exposure to physical traumas related to Sri Lanka’s
history.
Discussion:
Ethnoreligious Bias:
Though each participant gave a myriad mix of the shape, edges, content, and origins of
ethnoreligious tensions in Sri Lanka, all agreed that these frictions are currently alive and active.
When asked about what the source of today’s ethnoreligious tensions in Sri Lanka is,
Interviewee D pointed to “longstanding legacies of sectarian conflict that relate to the civil
war.” Interviewee A agrees that these tensions have been longstanding, but also points to more
recent history in the form of Sinhala-Buddhist extremism: the enforcement of “halal licenses”
for Muslim butchers, Buddhist monks encouraging violence, and the denial of war crimes
toward the end of conflict in 2009. While Interviewee B feels the tensions are more recent and
lie between Sinhalese and Muslim communities, Interviewee C suggests they have been
simmering and exist today mostly between Tamils and the Sinhalese. Interviewee E suggests
that these lines aren’t so neat when they report that most Sri Lankan Muslims speak Tamil—
"I’ve been told by my family a whole bunch that there is racism between Muslims and Sinhalese
people there. But I couldn’t tell you if it’s between Tamil and Sinhalese people there….[Though
Sri Lankan Muslims speak Tamil] I wouldn’t really identify myself as Tamil just because of that.”
Interviewee F points to an alternate scenario from the past, where “back then, instead of
speaking Tamil, Tamil people spoke English because they didn’t want people to know they were
Tamil because of all of the issues they were facing there.” They state further how these
tensions differ from the war as compared to today:
15[Now] there are Tamil signs everywhere and people are more comfortable speaking the
language and being themselves….[but] there’s this latent feeling of tension between
different communities. And that comes out whenever something like the Easter
bombings happen. And you immediately go to, is it from the government? Or is it
because it’s a Muslim versus Christian dispute? What’s happening? So I feel like, as far
as we’ve come, there’s still these latent tensions because there’s so much distrust
between the government and the various communities.
Interviewee F, as someone who is Sri Lankan Tamil, underlines just how much distrust that
remains between Tamil communities and the majority Sinhalese government. Speaking of Tamil
fears during the peaks of the civil war, Interviewee F alludes to the “white van fear,” where
Tamil civilians were “kidnapped, and raped, and murdered without their families even
knowing” when government white vans appeared in the North. While the end of the war
pushed a sense of recovery with the absence of the white vans, the return of a Rajapaksa-led
government once again has Tamils feeling that “’the white vans are coming back.’” Interviewee
F believes “the distrust between the people and the government is what’s always going to be
the biggest barrier. Because it’s like there’s always going to be a community that never has
recovered from the war.” Interviewee A agrees, acknowledging that it is problematic to have a
government that is roughly emblematic of a Sinhala-Buddhist majority in the country. “Just
think about the fact that there’s like a Buddha piluma, like the [Buddha] statue, in basically
every corner on when you're going through the cities right? So you know the government has a
responsibility in one way to kind of make it seem, ‘Well we're not focusing only on the majority,
that we treat all people equally.’” Interviewee C concurs, suggesting that the government has
“the authority to create programs to assimilate....They have that power to bring people
together.” Overall, despite the government allegedly having such powers, most participants
seemed to suggest that there is a lot of room for improvement.
Another major barrier to better ethnoreligious relations that a couple participants identified
was religion. Interviewee A claims that “personally I've always felt that the biggest dividing
thing in the world is religion because you can use that as your excuse, like ‘Oh God told me to
do this,’ so they have the sense of justification for doing terrible things.” Interviewee E echoes
this, suggesting that religion often correlates with culture. “We just constantly stay within our
16own culture, and [are] not willing to learn about other people, [which] just gets you to fear
them.” Interviewee E, who is from a Sri Lankan Moor Muslim background, implies that fear of
losing one’s religion and culture within Sri Lanka keep communities separated and in fear of
each other. “A guy like me, I can basically never meet a girl anywhere in Sri Lanka. Because their
parents don’t let them go out because they’re afraid they’re gonna meet the guys who they like
who aren’t in their religion.” Giving an example about what businesses family members interact
with, Interviewee E suggests that these sentiments keep ethnoreligious communities insular.
Speaking specifically about the Sri Lankan Muslim community, Interviewee E’s words might also
apply to the feelings of other groups as well:
My family in Sri Lanka, when they go to businesses, certain restaurants, I find that they
often will be patrons of Muslim businesses specifically. They only go, they’ll occasionally
go out of their way to make sure they go to a Muslim business. And um, I don’t know if
that’s because they just don’t want to go to Sinhalese people or if their main motive is
they want to support people that they know. But that’s definitely a thing. I don’t know if
the other side feels the same. If Sinhalese people specifically go to Sinhalese businesses.
But I do know, when I listen to my family talk about the business, they’ll specifically say,
“Oh he’s a Sinhalese guy,” and things like that. Or if they’re talking about a business say
with a Muslim guy, they’ll say “Oh he’s a Muslim guy, you can probably trust him”…. It’s
a way to get a foothold in the economy as well. If the group helps promote each other,
they can try to get along well. I feel like they care more about furthering their ethnic
group than they do the people of Sri Lanka, as a whole, you know?”
News Gathering and Social Media Usage:
The majority of participants cited family members as their initial primary source of news from
Sri Lanka, including their parents. However, all expressed a general hesitance to take any news
passed down from family members at face value. After initially getting news from family,
Interviewee C “[tries] to back it up with reading” and “information from my [Sri Lankan]
relatives of my generation.” Interviewee F reports that when a relative shares a news article
about Sri Lanka, they often try to verify the news being shared with another source, because
“even though it’s coming from something from my parents, I know it’s probably one-sided, and
not the full picture or fair-balanced picture of what the actual story is. So, to me, I don’t really
take much of it for face value. I think I’ll read it as an inform, and then look further into it to see
what actually really happened or what is the real story. Because it is just so biased just based on
17the news source.” When asked whether disagreements occur with family members and any
information they share, Interviewee B reported, “Plenty of times, plenty of times. They would
just tell me something that they had heard. And I would tell them, ‘What are the facts behind
this. Did you just read this off?’ You know? And yeah, there were some times I feel where
relatives, just go off of what’s said through words, through person-to-person rather than
through facts.” These responses suggest that despite such news coming from sources more
intimately connected to Sri Lanka, that the information they contain may be inaccurate and
biased by specific ethnoreligious lenses. The participants expressed similar sentiments on social
media-communicated news and information.
Among all participants interviewed, five reported using social media and gave input on its role
in contributing to ethnoreligious relations. The most commonly used applications were
Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. The majority of participants who use social media
understand how it has spread misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech in their various
online network communities. Interviewee A mentions a couple television shows documenting
that one of the places “Facebook has created social unrest was Sri Lanka.” Some cited the
connection of such disinformation to beliefs espoused by older Sri Lankan diaspora members.
Interviewee A goes on to say that “there are certain uncles who are typically the ones who are
well-informed. Then you have the uncles who see something on Facebook, and they’re like, ‘Oh
it’s that.’” Interviewee E went into detail about how one piece of disinformation was spread
through the Muslim community:
Someone posted on Instagram, that “Harvard says that the Quran is the most just book
of all time.” Right? And, I’m looking at myself and this quote, and I’m like, “Listen, there
is no way that Harvard Law School is saying that the Quran is the most just book of all
time.” …. And I became curious, why is this a thing? And also, other Islamic sites are
calling it the best book. [After searching,] apparently, the Quran is just quoted with a
bunch of different other quotes from different things. So Harvard just picked a quote
about justice from the Quran and put it on one of their walls…. And the Muslim
community ran with it and said, “Oh Harvard quoted the Quran as the best book for
justice of all time.” And this sort of propaganda….people like picked this quote on
images, and they spread it, and make it look real, and I’m like, there’s no way this could
be real.
18In trying to assess what drives the sharing and believing of such messages, a couple of
participants mentioned how these platforms are by design meant to serve as augmenters of
information within their own specific communities, without bringing in voices from other
communities. Interviewee E says, “What I think is, they’re not using social media to intermingle
with each other. If anything, it’s kind of just like furthering the echo chamber that people live
in.” Interviewee F reported that right after the 2019 Easter bombings:
Immediately, there were rumors of, “Oh it’s the government.” “It’s the government and
anti-Christian activists who are Muslim acting it out and attacking the churches.” And it
was all, so anti-government….I could tell that the articles were written in a biased way,
which made me question the validity of the resource itself…. And, you know how our
community is. They share these articles with each other. So this one biased article is
being shared with everybody in the community, which then biases the perspective of
that community.
Interviewee E, who is from a Sri Lankan Muslim community, adds to this, believing that social
media is “not promoting people being with each other and figuring out their issues. It just
promotes people getting together and group hating.” Interviewee E went on to corroborate
that social media networks are so siloed by identity among Sri Lankan communities, that even
when posts by Sinhalese-Buddhist extremists that were targeting Muslim communities went
viral, Muslim communities were unlikely to see this propaganda that was largely putting
Muslims in danger.
These comments highlight a number of problematic issues within social media usage more
generally, and how it specifically relates to issues among Sri Lankans. First, such descriptions
speak to the deep, solely within-group networks that some social media platforms have
become—without any moderation by other perspectives. Much has been written about how
social media fragments users into political echo chambers (Bright, 2017). Analysis of social
media-fueled hate speech in Sri Lanka specifically illustrates how tactful posts can incite
violence, suggesting that “there is no technical solution to what is a socio-political problem”
(Samaratunge, 2014 p. 7). Incredibly, such sentiments were validated by a social media
experiment that attempted to expose users to opposing viewpoints, which subsequently found
even further ideological polarization (Bail, et al, 2018). These observations call into question
19common-sense logic that exposure to different perspectives may temper extremism.
Interviewee E’s particular observation that targets of mob violence may not see the online signs
of impending attacks against them, adds another layer in understanding how digital violence
becomes transformed into the physical.
Despite all of these issues around social media, some participants acknowledged there are
advantages for their specific communities—when echo chambers are helpful. Participant E
reported that “when there is a certain popularity in hating Muslims in Sri Lanka, I know they do
send mass messages [through social media], saying, ‘Hey maybe you should stay inside for the
next couple days or so.’ Or, ‘Don’t go near this area. I hear that people are near there.’”
Interviewee F suggested how social media has been important in telling the stories of Sri
Lankan Tamils who would be otherwise unheard. “Social media has really helped just from a
storytelling perspective of getting stories out there of people who have gone through
something, but who are also trying to fight for justice….I know they had just released the names
of twenty thousand people that had been kidnapped and murdered from the war, right? So
stories of those individual people are being shared on social media, and I think it sheds more
light to the issue.”
Exposure to Violence/Disaster:
All participants acknowledged having family members and knowing community members
directly affected by the violence of the civil war, the 2004 tsunami, the Easter 2019 bombings,
and other events within Sri Lanka’s last three decades. Interviewee F states, “my whole family
was impacted by the war. My extended family were all displaced.” Interviewee F’s grandfather
and his colleague horrifically stepped on planted landmines while attempting to assist Tamil
refugees in the early 1990s. Their aunt left late into the war and was forced to hide in trucks
because “there were people looking for them. It was like really trying to escape a war zone at
that point.” Interviewee F also had two relatives die from the 2004 tsunami. “My uncle was
sick, and he was in a wheelchair. So, when the tsunami hit, they were on the third floor. And in
that mad rush, he couldn’t get up and walk up the stairs. So he stayed on the third floor, and his
20wife stayed with him. So unfortunately they passed away because they couldn’t get to higher
ground.”
Others expressed similar connections to the war and the tsunami. Interviewee D, who is a
Burgher-Sinhalese Catholic, has a distant relative “who was taken hostage by the [Tamil]
Tigers.” Interviewee C, a Sinhalese Catholic, remembers “whenever we went to Sri Lanka when I
was little—we didn’t go out much…There was one summer where there were a lot of random
bombs that were happening. So, we didn’t really go out. We had people come visit us.”
Interviewee E, who is from a Moor Muslim background, had a family friend die from a bomb
while traveling by bus. Interviewee B, a Sinhalese Buddhist, also notes that his father’s cousin
died from a bomb. When attending school in Sri Lanka, Interviewee B’s “parents would always
take us and drop us off, rather than us taking public transport. Because a lot of the bombings
happened on buses, public transportation. Yeah, it was a very scary time.” Interviewee A, who
is Sinhalese-Buddhist, had two family members die from the Easter 2019 bombings:
One of my aunts and her mom….got killed last year with the bombing [---]. When we
went to Sri Lanka in September, we went to her house and saw her husband, [---] and
my [aunt] had an 11-month old baby who will never get to know her mom now. So yeah.
Usually when we go, it’s a very cheerful place. [---] It was a very vibrant environment but
this time it was just a very somber place. And you could tell that both husbands were
very shell-shocked, and even my family, my mom, were just very emotional from it.
Regardless of ethnoreligious background, all participants were touched in some way by Sri
Lanka’s violent and tragic history, though in different ways and to varying degrees. As
Interviewee E says, “I’m sure a lot of people you speak to will have someone they knew in Sri
Lanka affected by some other bad thing going on there.”
Mental Health:
Two participants (Interviewees A and F) acknowledged awareness of mental illness in their
specific communities, and directly linked it to exposure to violence or physical trauma. One
participant (Interviewee E) acknowledged encountering “countless amounts of, you know,
mental illness cases in Sri Lanka. But I couldn’t tell you—it wasn’t the result of bombings or
21anything like that.” Similarly, another participant (Interviewee D) was aware of mental illness,
but “would only describe it in more, suburban middle class, ethnic terms, where that would be
a certain hesitance to seek mental health help….more to do with suburban anxieties rather
than anything that I would think of is intentionally, or decisively related to being Sri Lankan.”
Interviewees A and F had similar responses, where they knew of individuals in the community
with mental health issues, though stated that they might not be “outwardly affected,” but
rather attributed to years of exposure to trauma and violence. Both suggest significant stigma
against mental illness within the Sri Lankan diaspora broadly and their own communities
specifically. Interviewee F, who is Tamil and whose family members experienced violence
firsthand, probably states it best when they say, “I’ve had a cousin who had depression, and
then their parents feel like, ‘Oh no they’re just really sad all the time. They just need to be
happier.’ Because they don’t really understand it. So, to me, I think I’ve seen it a lot, and I’ve
seen it being dismissed a lot in the community.” Throughout the interview, Interviewee F
mentioned “PTSD” in describing how their Tamil community and Sri Lanka in general has been
exposed to decades of war and trauma while still dealing with those effects. They refer to their
grandfather, who stepped on a landmine during the height of the war. “Even my grandpa, going
through what he went through, I would tell him he had PTSD. But even though he doesn’t
display what you would normally think of as PTSD just in some of his mannerisms, it’s
something very traumatic that he went through. But he would never have said that. Because I
think….mental health was not a thing that they would even consider.”
These thoughts accurately describe a general reluctance to discuss mental health by affected
populations, but also suggest the regional and generational issues surrounding mental illness
from a South Asian and Sri Lankan perspective. These participants, being a generation removed
from those who more directly lived through the terrors of the civil war and the tsunami, bear
more of a willingness to at least recognize a mental health burden within their communities.
Additionally, their relative geographic removal by living most of their lives in North America
likely also contributes to their understanding of mental illness and what may cause it. Referring
22specifically to knowing “people who have depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, all of these
things,” Interviewee F’s response suggests a level of mental illness burden that may be more
commensurate with the Sri Lankan Tamil community’s disproportionate exposure to violence
through the civil war’s three decades. This discrepancy between ethnoreligious groups
interviewed underlines evidence that greater exposure to large-scale violence, as Tamil
communities who have largely lived in the North and Northeast of the country have endured
more than other ethnoreligious groups, often is linked with a greater burden of mental illness
(Charlson, et al, 2019). In addition to research (Doherty, et al, 2019) and lay press (Mashal,
2018) suggesting an overwhelming mental health burden in Sri Lanka’s Northern and
Northeastern regions, Sri Lanka’s most recent Demographic and Health Survey in 2016
corroborates this (Sri Lanka DHS, 2016). Across all Sri Lankan districts, the highest percentage of
people being treated for any mental illness was in Kilinochchi (Sri Lanka DHS, 2016, p 233), and
the highest percentage of attempted suicide was in Mullaitivu (Sri Lanka DHS, 2016, p 236)—
both located in the North and Northeast that saw the worst of the civil war.
While acknowledging that Tamil communities likely indeed bear a huge share in the mental
illness burden of Sri Lanka, due in no small part to chronically enduring excesses of extreme
violence, comments by other interviewees refer to mental illness within non-Tamil
communities which they don’t necessarily attribute to the country’s history. These views may
hint at the complex and hidden ways that specific exposures can lead to mental illness, while
also alluding to a general uncertainty of what “causes” mental illness. And yet, all participants
acknowledged exposure to traumatic experiences by their various communities. And in addition
to physical traumas, Sri Lankan communities collectively have been exposed to other mediators
of mental illness, including historical trauma through post-colonialism (Gone, 2013) and poverty
(Lund, et al, 2010, p 525). Thus, despite a lack of linearity between seeing mental illness arise
within certain participant communities that can then be traced back to concrete stressors, the
relationship between the two phenomena may be more subtle. As Interviewee A suggests,
“while it may not materialize for everyone in a suicide or something as broad cast, it is these
23micro ways that it affects people that kind of have a similar effect. It’s not all out there, but it’s
there and it builds up over time.”
Limitations:
While this study achieved its goal in garnering ethnoreligious representation among major
groups within the Sri Lankan diaspora, a major limitation is the number of actual participants.
Though participants often spoke of larger-level family and community dynamics during the
interviews, having more interview participants would strengthen the themes attributed to
these conversations. Additionally, participants interviewed were fairly young in age, and their
views, as they themselves have suggested, would likely not be representative of older
generations. One possible intervention that may have augmented participation by greater
numbers of the Sri Lankan diaspora may have been through direct person-to-person outreach
of communities as opposed to electronic communication to institutions and community
leaders. An example of this could have been to attend community meetings, such as religious
ceremonies or functions, and develop in-person relationships with community members,
instead of relying on outreach via email. Not only would such encounters engender greater
trust among participant communities, but they may have also provided greater diversity in
terms of age and gender representation among participants. Through inclusion of older
populations, there may have been greater insight into news-gathering practices, including social
media usage, as well as the perceived mental health landscape among populations more
exposed to Sri Lanka’s history of violence and disaster.
An additional limitation that is likely unmeasurable is the role of my own ethnoreligious
background in conducting interviews with participants who represented all of Sri Lanka’s
ethnoreligious diversity. While having a Sri Lankan connection might prove to be beneficial in
discussing these issues more intimately, it may also serve as a barrier for those who don’t share
my ethnoreligious identity in truly expressing their viewpoints. While interviews were
conducted on condition of confidentiality, my own personal identity could have held back some
participants from sharing more open or honest opinions.
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