It begins with silence — not the kind that precedes a blast, but the kind that follows. A silence filled not with peace, but with dust, smoke, and the distant echo of what was once laughter.
On April 21, 2019, a series of coordinated suicide bombings in Sri Lanka turned sacred spaces into scenes of ruin. In an instant, churches became tombs, and luxury hotels were stained with fear and blood. The steps once meant for morning breakfast walks were soaked red. Foreigners, locals, believers, and sceptics alike were felled by an invisible logic that had, for a long time, been gaining ground in the shadows.
For those who remember the long war that ended in 2009, this return to death was not just a moment — it was a collapse. A collapse of hope, of the fragile idea that peace, once earned with such cost, would not be lost again to another shape of terror. But violence, like a virus, mutates. The end of one war had only masked the growth of another.
The Easter Sunday attack did not target armies or combatants. It targeted joy—on a religious holiday, in places meant for prayer and reunion. Nine men, prepared by years—of training, turned themselves into weapons. Their calmness, their silence before detonation, remains one of the most chilling aspects of the attack. One calmly touched a child before walking toward destruction.
How does one explain this?
But the signs had been there. Months before the attack, in 2018, two police officers were killed at the Vavunathivu checkpoint in the Batticaloa district. At this time, I was serving at the Defence Research at the Institute of National Security Studies (INSS). The killings raised alarms, and I voiced my doubts, suggesting the incident did not fit the known patterns of LTTE resurgence. It felt different — something more sinister.
Shortly after, a well-known Professor of Terrorism contacted me and insisted I was wrong. He advised I stop writing and speaking on a subject I “did not understand,” asserting that the LTTE was behind the attack.
He was wrong. Blindness — both academic and institutional— was part of the primary problem. Whether by design or by neglect, the result was the same. The later investigations revealed that the perpetrators of the Vavunathivu killings were connected to the same extremist network that would later carry out the Easter Sunday bombings. It was something far more ideologically warped and globally rooted. This failure to correctly identify the threat was emblematic of a wider failure to read the signs, to connect the dots.
On that Easter morning in 2019, I was walking with my wife and children towards the breakfast area of the Shangri-La hotel. I had just pressed the lift when the bombs detonated one after another. The blast tore through the air just metres away. Glass shattered. People screamed. And then — stillness. Not peace, but a paralytic, disorienting stillness. We were alive. Others were not. Among the dead were the children who went for their Easter breakfast, the same children who shared the swimming pool with me the other day.
That moment — suspended between death and survival—has never left me. It returns in dreams, in silences, in the sound of breaking glass.
What made Sri Lanka again vulnerable to this return of terror? It was not simply ideology, nor solely the ambition of an extremist group, what the FBI tried to explain. The failure was internal. Political dysfunction. Bureaucratic paralysis. External interference. Warnings were known — multiple, credible alerts, some documented by analysts and others passed on by foreign intelligence. These were not heeded. The machinery of the State, meant to protect its people, was jammed by political rivalry and indifference. Intelligence was siloed. Decisions were delayed. And the cost was measured in bodies.
One such warning came four months before the attack. In January 2019, while serving as Director General of the Institute of National Security Studies (INSS), I submitted a Monthly Threat Forecast (MTF) to the Ministry of Defence. This document, grounded in the Wanathavilluwa detonator discovery, identified a high-level threat to the nation. The forecast, bearing my signature, was formally submitted to the President. It was later cited in Volume I of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry (PCOI) report on the Easter attacks—on pages 257, 262, and 352. Despite testifying for two full days and submitting a detailed 13-page report, my analysis was barely referenced. Most critically, the Commission acknowledged: had I been provided with the Indian intelligence warning dated April 4, 2019, it would have directly aligned with my prior warning in January. The opportunity to prevent the attack was real. And it was missed.
First warning
On April 4, 2019, when the first warning came from India, India alone was preparing to send their own Defence Secretary, Sanjay Mitra, for the April 8 India–Sri Lanka Defence Dialogue. I attended this dialogue, extremism threat nor any terror threat was in the agenda. Someone took it out of the agenda? Why would India issue a critical warning while simultaneously despatching their top defence official into a geography under high alert? Some questions still go unanswered — not because answers don’t exist, but because asking them aloud remains inconvenient. I was dwelling with the questions when I was transferred from my work indefinitely, a strange transfer which was never executed.
There was a time when Sri Lanka was called a national security state. Years of war had forced this identity. And yet, in the years after peace, the very architecture that once protected the island was dismantled too quickly. Liberalism arrived fast and unexamined—mistaken for permissiveness, and used as a reason to dismantle the very structures that had kept the nation intact. In the global race to appear democratic, core protections were weakened, and some parts of the West applauded without understanding the risk.
Demilitarise, reduce the strength of our armed forces was a topic of interest to the West.
There were whispers then, as there are now. About backdoors and external interests. About global players who benefit from destabilised peripheries. The truth may never be fully known. But Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith’s caution still rings loud: such attacks are rarely without deeper geopolitical layers.
The attackers, what they destroyed was far larger than a few buildings. They fractured the quiet confidence of a recovering nation. They injected suspicion into the fabric of daily life.
No foreign agreement, no imported policy will fix our own national security. Only our own effort will.
The Government must audit its failures honestly and publicly. It must stop thinking in terms of political cycles and begin thinking in terms of generations. A more in-depth strategic thinking is required for the nation.
Terrorism thrives in silence — in the silence of inaction, the silence of leaders, the silence of communities too afraid or too tired to confront what festers in their midst. It is a silence louder than any explosion. What happened on April 21 was not fate. It was allowed.
But the future need not be.
If there is any meaning left to extract from senseless tragedy, it is this: Sri Lanka must not only mourn—it must refuse to forget. It must return not to conflict, but to vigilance. And not to fear, but to resolve. The simplest acts of honesty from Government, kindness, of civic courage, and of honest remembrance will be how the island begins to reclaim its soul.
The dead do not speak. But their silence, like the one that followed the blast, is a warning.
The writer lives in Washington DC. He is a Senior Fellow at the Millennium Project and Executive Director of South Asia Foresight Network for the Millennium project.
