— Reuters picCOLOMBO, March 6 — Sri Lanka has declared a state of emergency for 10 days to rein in the spread of communal violence, a government spokesman said today, a day after Buddhists and Muslims clashed in the Indian Ocean island’s central district of Kandy. “This is being done by a few jealous people.”

Sri Lankan police officers attempt to douse burning shops in Ambatenna, in central Sri Lanka (Rukmal Gamage/AP) Muslims own many of the small businesses in Sri Lanka, a fact that many believe has helped make them targets as Buddhist-Muslim relations have worsened in recent years amid the rise of hard-line Buddhist groups, which accuse Muslims of forcing people to convert and destroying sacred Buddhist sites. Some Buddhist nationalists have also protested against the presence in Sri Lanka of Muslim Rohingya asylum-seekers from mostly Buddhist Myanmar, where Buddhist nationalism has also been on the rise. The eviction took place overnight — people left behind their houses, lands, shops, and possessions, becoming a new set of internally displaced people in Sri Lanka’s conflict. In Kandy, a Buddhist man succumbed on March 4 to injuries after an altercation a few days earlier with a group of Muslim men, and a Muslim man’s body was found in a building that was the target of arson in Kandy on Tuesday. Under the emergency, which was imposed for the first time since 2011, following the end of the civil war with Tamil separatists two years before that, security forces can carry out searches without warrant and detain suspects without charges.
Sri Lanka imposes a nationwide 10-day state of emergency, the first since 2011, in an effort to calm communal tensions. The previous day, a Sinhalese Buddhist mob attack on Sri Lankan Muslim shops in the region of Kandy, Central Province, left a Muslim person dead.