To burn or to bury? That has become the bedeviling Covid-19 question in Sri Lanka with no respect for the dead and no empathy for those who are left to mourn. According to WHO guidelines, Covid-19 victim’s bodies are not infectious, unless other complications are involved – such as hemorrhagic fevers (Ebola, Marburg) or cholera. In general, dead bodies themselves are not infectious, but body fluids are and they secrete even after death. So, there is universal insistence on and compliance with the protocols for handing dead bodies, not only by funeral workers but also by families. But the question, whether cremation or burial, is a redundant question and it has been unnecessarily overwrought. But only in Sri Lanka, and chiefly by the government itself.
For perspective, there have been public protests against cremating Covid-19 victims in Kerala and in West Bengal. So, one can argue either way if being argumentative is the be all and end all of patriotism. To their credit, the Indian federal and state governments have allowed both cremation and burial, leaving it to the family but with all hazmat protocols and precautions.
In Sri Lanka, it gets ridiculous. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has apparently asked the Maldivian government if Maldives could help by providing burial funerals for Sri Lankan Muslims who die from Covid-19 infection. That would be a first for any country. Already four UN Special Rapporteurs, not counting the ones at UNHRC, have called on Sri Lanka not to ban Muslim burials but allow them in accordance with WHO guidelines. Is Sri Lanka on course to run afoul of every UN Rapporteur? And why?
Fear Mongering
The fear mongering, not the prudent concern, about groundwater contamination is another fallopian nonsense. As with Caesarian sterilization, as with the Millennium Compact (which the US has now revoked), the government has dug itself another hole while banning graves for Covid-19 victims. If it is feared that graves will contaminate groundwater, it is fair to ask, what about contamination from sceptic tanks? Sanitary flows, landfill leachate, open defecation are potential pathogen carriers, but not necessarily of the coronavirus. Are drones going to be flown around to catch people answering the nature’s call in the most natural way?
Whether burial or cremation, there are safety protocols to be followed even in normal circumstances. There should be a sense of proportion. If a thousand non-infected, non-Covid-19, bodies are cremated at one location, over one week, and not far from a residential area, no one is going to be amused. In fact, there will be hellish fury. Even a hundred bodies will cause concerns, petitions, and protests. Similarly, if a thousand bodies are buried in a very short period, in a small cemetery, and close to wells or surface waterbodies, that would be a matter for grave concern. No one is talking about mass burials or mass cremations in Sri Lanka. The numbers are small, but the shouting is deafening.
Until late October, even while the burial debate was already in full flames, the total number of Covid-19 deaths was still under 20. Even if all of them were buried in one cemetery, that should not have been a matter for concern. The current death total is 160 and rising. But not all of Covid-19 victims are Muslims, or Christians, requiring a burial. They are a minority in life, in Sri Lanka, and so in death. And not all burials are going to be at the same location. In fact, it will not be a good idea to select a central location for all burials. So, if burials are allowed to take place the way they have been for centuries, the sky will not fall and the ground water is not going to be poisoned.
Proportionality and risk assessment are among the key considerations that guide the selection and location of public facilities, and that includes cemeteries and crematoriums. While cemeteries and crematoriums serve a spiritual purpose, their operations and maintenance come under more mundane considerations like public safety and environmental protection.
The Environmental Agency in England has addressed these matters in the context of Covid-19 and the potential risks from increased burials. Notably, the agency has waived the normal permit requirement for local authorities or cemetery operators undertaking new cemetery development or expanding existing cemeteries to accommodate the increased burials during Covid19. It has only provided guidelines for addressing groundwater risks for new cemeteries, but risks due to the increased number of burials, not due to Covid-19. The Agency is not concerned about Covid-19 infection in burials, but only the number of burials relative to their locations.
England alone has had over 57,000 people die due to Covid-19 so far, and the vast majority of them have been buried. Sri Lanka’s death toll is 160, and a majority of them are cremated. What higher risk would Sri Lanka face by allowing a few dozens of Covid-19 burials at most, than what England and all other countries allowing vastly larger number of burials are facing and dealing with? How did Sri Lanka, and this government particularly, get into such a grave hole, while protesting burials?
A cabal government?
According to the National People’s Power (NPP) MP Dr Harini Amarasuriya, “a cabal of state officials and their close associates in the business community have been making important government decisions bypassing the prime minister and the cabinet of ministers.” This has been evident for quite some time, and what is also clear is that there is more than one cabal, and that the cabals have got the ear of the President and isolated him from everyone else – including cabinet of ministers (which is not saying much), even the Rajapaksa family, and most of all its political godfather – the Prime Minister himself.
The cabals are not limited to state officials and business eople, and include professionals who use their trade union muscle to compensate for their professional inadequacies. The GMOA is the most notorious villain of the piece, but it may not be the only one. In the upshot, the government is unnecessarily complicating matters more than what they already are and they may invariably have to be. The government has become its own arsonist, setting up more fires without putting down any. And letting crisis after crisis to crop up with no end in sight. The burn or bury question is one such crisis. Avoidable and unnecessary.
The latest manifestations of this cabal power are the ultra vires sacking of the national Medical Council, a statutory body established in 1926, and the upcoming electrocution of the Public Utilities Commission, another statutory body . Before these was the eruption out of nowhere of prison riots which were ministerially attributed to hidden hands; but there are no hidden hands, only the government’s bloodied hands. And in the most bizarre topping to this cabal state of governance, three government ministers, two of them medical professionals, have been publicly partaking in homemade potions of a purportedly Covid-19 vaccine or cure. All of this and more in the middle of a global pandemic and economic shutdowns.
Not surprisingly, the economy shrank by a whopping 16.3% in Q-2 of 2020, recovering to grow by 1.5% in Q-3, and contracting overall by 5.3% for the first nine months. Hardly the situation for making rosy projections for 2021. And Covid-19 is not letting up at all. It keeps its infections climbing with apparent vengeance after lying low, or undetected, till early October. Infections and deaths have since multiplied ten times and are at the fearsome inflection point for a potentially exponential breakout. This is not a call for panic, but for signs that the government understands what the stakes are and what it takes to get things under control. The signs are anything but!
https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/to-burn-or-to-bury-the-deadly-question/
By Ameer Ali –
In no country in the world except Sri Lanka and perhaps its “predator” ally China that Muslims are cremated when they die because of Covid-19; and no epidemiologist, virologist or medical expert in the world except the chief health officer in Sri Lanka believes that Corona virus would spread if the victims are buried. This officer spuriously justified his stand on the ground that the underground water level in the country is too high. His argument, backed by a so-called soil scientist, Meththika Vithanage from Jayawardenapura University, who wrote, “break the ground and infect us all”, has now been accepted as heavenly truth by sections of local Buddhist clergy, members of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s Viyathmaga and Rajapaksa’s government. Allowing burial for Muslims is to bury the regime itself, said one such monk. No amount of appeal or protest from any Muslim group either locally or internationally, and not even advice from WHO and other world experts could reverse the regime’s decision. Yet, whether cremated or buried the virus is spreading in almost every part of the country, and the entire Muslim community is traumatized.
Why is this intransigence? Is there something more sinister than just the water level argument and so called One-Country-One-Law (OCOL) mantra? Are there other advisors like for example, Chinese experts occupying the Shangri-La in Colombo? The close relation between the Rajapaksas and China is no secret, and with deteriorating economic conditions at home and desperate need for funds to invest in economic recovery, China has become a friend in need and lender of last resort. There is no use in hiding the fact that Sri Lanka under the current regime is virtually becoming China’s client state. With that type of economic nexus, China’s experience with her own Muslim communities like Uighurs may have some useful lessons for local supremacists behind Rajapaksa regime to learn from.
To the local supremacists, Muslims are aliens and they should either be sent back to Arabia or be ‘molded’, as the obstreperous monk Gnanasara said in June last year. China was silent when the Rohingyas in Myanmar were massacred and expelled, and is now engaged in molding Uighur Muslims and in brainwashing them with Chinese thought and values. It is reported that the Uighurs in Xinjiang are put into three hundred internment camps, force fed with pig meat, prevented from praying, fasting and reciting the Quran. Hundreds of Uighur burial grounds are being destroyed and turned into parks and playgrounds in the name of development. Shockingly for world Muslims, it was reported that Saudi Prince Muhammad bin Salman, the supposed architect behind Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal murder, supported China’s cultural cleansing measures on grounds of “anti-terrorism” and “de-extremism”. Isn’t Islamic extremism and Islamic fundamentalism the rallying cries for Buddhist supremacists in Sri Lanka, especially after the Easter Sunday massacre? Isn’t also true that President Gotabaya looks for development as the solution to the Tamil problem and by extension to Muslim problem also?
Sri Lanka does not have internment camps for Muslims yet. However, a series of incidents where Muslims are being forced to evacuate their lands and dwellings like in Devanagala in Mawanella, Thampala in Polonnaruwa and Sampur in Trincomalee bound to make them homeless and vagrants. Gotabaya’s Archaeology Task Force is also accused of being more interested in grabbing private lands for Sinhalese colonization than excavating ancient ruins. If this mode of forced evacuations increases in number, Muslim homelessness will become a national issue demanding speedy solution from government. It may not happen tomorrow but probably in near future. Won’t internment camps be an attractive solution when such situation arises?
With economic difficulties mounting almost daily and sporadic street protests hidden from public view by government backing media, the regime is running out of options to control mass anger. It needs an issue badly to deflate anti-regime fury and divert mass attention elsewhere. Muslim burial issue is becoming handy for supremacists and their government to do just that. This appears to be the agenda behind the burial issue.
In the meantime, there is growing anger among Muslim youth specially over government’s intransigence on this issue. It goes to the very heart of Muslim religious rites and it torments the entire community. There are enough idiots within that community like in any other community to do something silly to spark widespread violence against Muslims. Are the supremacists waiting for such a spark for a return of July 1983, and this time against Muslims?
It is time for the Muslim community to give up any hope for a solution to this issue from the government, and dismiss completely the value of a Muslim minister in the cabinet let alone lame duck Muslim parliamentarians. The supremacists have more clout over Gotabaya than his Attorney- at-Call Muslim Minister. Allowing the state to cremate the Muslim dead at its own expense seems to be the best response to its intransigence however much the distress it may cause to Muslim families. It is sheer non-sense even to contemplate Maldives to provide a solution to Muslim burials. If burying under the sands of Maldives, which is fast sinking in to the sea because of global warming, won’t spread the virus why should it spread if buried in Sri Lanka, whose elevation from sea level is far higher than Maldives? Where is the water level argument? The burial issue has nothing to do with soil or water and every thing to do with politics.
The community should think of the long term, and work towards the return of a democratic and “plurinational” Sri Lanka with more powers vested in the parliament than in the hands of an autocratic president. Shamefully, it was leaders from the Muslim community who were instrumental in creating the current situation. Let them agonize in silence for their treacherous behaviour.
There is a committee of experts appointed by the government to draft a new constitution. The Muslim community should make use of this opportunity and join hands with such inter-religious and inter-communal groups that are striving to create a Sri Lanka with a constitution “that is modern, futuristic, and incorporates the rights stipulated in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as swell as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights”. Ball is in the community’s court.
https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/behind-the-muslim-burial-issue/