Fifteen people stand convicted. The headlines beam with a triumphant sense of closure. Justice served, the public is told, the books balanced, the ghosts of the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka finally laid to rest.
It is a comfortable illusion. And it is entirely worthless.
When a state secures mass convictions of peripheral actors while the foundational architectures of institutional failure remain untouched, it has not delivered justice. It has delivered theatre. We are expected to applaud a courtroom victory while ignoring the rot in the machinery that allowed the carnage to happen in the first place
Why Prosecuting Foot Soldiers for the Easter Bombings is a Convenience Not Justice
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Fifteen people convicted. A gavel slams. Headlines beam out of Colombo celebrating closure after the horrific 2019 Easter Sunday bombings that ripped through churches and luxury hotels.
It makes for clean television. It offers grieving families a temporary psychological salve. It gives the state an institutional win to wave around at international human rights summits.
It is also an absolute sham if you think it addresses the structural reality of how modern transnational jihadist cells actually operate.
The lazy consensus dominating media coverage treats these convictions as the final act of a tragic play. Arrest the planners, convict the foot soldiers, close the file, and pretend the system has healed. This perspective fundamentally misunderstands the anatomy of asymmetric radicalization. When you focus solely on the low-level operatives who pulled triggers or strapped on vests, you confuse a symptom with a disease. You punish the match while ignoring the oxygen in the room.
The Bureaucracy of Blame
Let us look at the mechanics of what actually happened. The standard narrative frames the 2019 attacks as an isolated local tragedy executed by a rogue domestic splinter group operating in a vacuum. That framing is profoundly comforting to the security establishment because it localizes the failure. It allows intelligence agencies to point fingers at bureaucratic incompetence, missed memos, and political infighting between a president and a prime minister who refused to speak to each other.
Missed memos are symptoms, not the root cause.
I have spent years tracking how intelligence apparatuses fail during asymmetric threats, and the pattern is always identical. State institutions are built to fight yesterday's war. They track traditional insurgencies, conventional political dissent, and organized crime syndicates with hierarchical command structures. When confronted with decentralized cells inspired by digital propaganda networks, traditional bureaucracies lock up. They hoard information like currency. They prioritize political survival over risk mitigation.
When a court hands down fifteen convictions, it validates the state's monopoly on narrative. It tells the public that justice was served because a specific number of defendants were processed through a specific set of legal procedures. But legal process is not synonymous with systemic accountability.
Consider what these convictions leave untouched. Did the verdicts dismantle the financial pipelines that allowed local radicals to purchase explosives? Did they reform the intelligence-sharing protocols that failed to act on specific foreign warnings delivered days before the carnage? Did they address the socioeconomic alienation and political opportunism that create fertile ground for extremist recruiters in the first place?
No. They put fifteen bodies in a cell and called it a day.
The Dangerous Comfort of Closure
Closure is a narcotic. Societies emerging from collective trauma crave it so desperately that they will accept cheap facsimiles of justice just to quiet the noise.
When people ask whether justice has finally been served for the victims of the Easter bombings, they are asking the wrong question. The question is not whether fifteen men were legally convicted under penal codes. The question is whether the architecture that permitted the attacks to happen in plain sight has been structurally dismantled, or if it has merely been rebranded.
If you talk to investigators who actually worked the ground level after the explosions, they will tell you about a terrifying reality of modern counter-terrorism: the network is always faster than the bureaucracy. By the time a magistrate signs an arrest warrant, the organizational DNA of the cell has already mutated, migrated, or gone dormant under a different banner.
Convicting fifteen operatives does nothing to stop the next radicalization cycle. In fact, if prison systems remain what they currently are—warehouses of neglect and unmonitored ideological incubation—mass incarceration of low-level suspects often acts as a finishing school for the next generation of extremists. We are not neutralizing threats; we are concentrating them in concrete boxes where they can network undisturbed.
Uncomfortable Truths About State Complicity
We must confront a darker reality that polite geopolitical commentary sweeps under the rug. Modern terrorism rarely happens in a state of pure institutional ignorance. It thrives in the gray zones of political negligence, where intelligence is weaponized for factional advantage, and where warnings are ignored because acting on them disrupts short-term political convenience.
When local and international intelligence agencies had specific, actionable chatter about an impending attack and failed to coordinate, that was not an administrative glitch. That was a systems failure born of hubris.
By hyper-focusing public attention on the courtroom drama of fifteen convicted individuals, the political class achieves a brilliant distraction. The trial becomes a theater of accountability that shields the upper echelons of administrative failure from real scrutiny. As long as the cameras are pointed at the dock, no one is looking at the structural rot within the national security apparatus that ignored foreign intelligence warnings.
True accountability would require institutional self-immolation. It would require stripping away the legal immunities of officials who slept on their watch. It would require an independent, transparent audit of intelligence failures that leaves no sacred cow untouched.
Instead, we got fifteen convictions and a press release.
Breaking the Cycle
If we want to stop treating the symptoms of extremist violence while feeding the disease, we have to abandon the illusion that criminal trials equal prevention.
Stop treating counter-terrorism as a retroactive legal exercise. A court verdict is a post-mortem report disguised as a cure. If your primary defense against catastrophic violence is the ability to successfully prosecute the survivors after the bombs go off, you have already lost the strategic war.
We need to stop accepting institutional incompetence as an unfortunate accident and start treating it as a primary risk factor. Until we hold intelligence and political leadership to the same standard of operational liability that we apply to the foot soldiers they fail to stop, every conviction is just another curtain raiser for the next tragedy.
Justice isn't achieved when the courtroom doors lock behind the last defendant. It is achieved when the system that let them walk through the church doors in the first place is dismantled brick by brick.
