People traveling by bus to polling stations in northern Sri Lanka were shot at, pelted with stones and blocked by burning tires hours before polls opened in presidential elections yesterday, in what a member of the Sri Lankan Elections Commission called a coordinated effort to disenfranchise Muslims.
There were no reported injuries and police were investigating, said Manjula Gajanayake, spokesman for the Colombo-based Center for Monitoring Election Violence.
Campaigning for Sri Lanka’s presidential election was dominated by worries over national security, which was pushed to the forefront after deadly Islamic State-inspired suicide bomb attacks on April 21 that killed 269 people.
Photo: Reuters
The people attacked yesterday were part of a convoy organized by supporters of Sri Lankan Minister of Housing Sajith Premadasa, who is seeking the presidency, and was taking them to vote in the northern district of Mannar.
Many Muslims fled the area in 1982, when a Tamil insurgency began to grow, and others were evicted from the nation’s north in 1990.
The commission had encouraged them to register as voters in Mannar, but had not arranged enough transportation to bring them from their homes in the northwestern district of Puttalam, Gajanayake said.
Shreen Saroor, an activist working with displaced Muslims, said the attack made them more determined to vote and they were using public transport and private vehicles to get to the polling stations in Mannar.
“There is a concerted effort to keep the Muslims away from the ballot box,” Elections Commission member Ratnajeevan Hoole told reporters.
It was not immediately clear whether any of the attackers had been arrested.
There is fear among Tamils and Muslims about a return to power of presidential front-runner Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a former defense official under his brother, former Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa.
The Rajapaksa brothers are revered by Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese Buddhist majority for defeating the Tamil Tiger rebels in 2009 and ending the nation’s long-running civil war, but because of their actions during and after the war, some minorities fear their return.
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