Tamil Protests downtown

[Whoaccio]

How expats are fueling a bloodbath in Sri Lanka.

By Nirmala Rajasingam

Since April 2009, hundreds of Tamil expatriates have been protesting the recent escalation of fighting in Sri Lanka in unprecedented numbers across the world's capitals. Demonstrators filled a Toronto park on May 13, and 100 Tamils marched outside the White House this week. In Britain, at least 500 Tamils held a sit-in protest outside of Parliament.

Yet the demonstrators are almost exclusively Tamil; there are no faces from the local host communities or the other Sri Lankan ethnicities at the demonstrations. Why has the situation in Sri Lanka failed to attract wider concern?

Certainly, there is an ongoing humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions in Sri Lanka today. More than 50,000 Tamil civilians are trapped between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), popularly known as the Tamil Tigers. While the government has shelled civilian areas, the LTTE has used those same civilians as human shields. Hundreds are dying and countless more are injured without medical assistance.

The government of Sri Lanka refuses to accept the extensive humanitarian assistance offered by the international community, and has refused a temporary cease-fire that could allow the trapped civilians to safely exit the combat zone. This is a war that the Sri Lankan state has fought against the Tamil Tiger rebels over two decades -- one it never thought it could win. Now, with a possible end in sight, even a temporary pause is out of the question. Despite international condemnation, the government shows little sign of budging.

But if the government garners little sympathy these days, the Tamil Tigers evoke even less. For 20 years, the Tigers have positioned themselves as the sole representative of the Tamil people, an ethnic group in north east Sri Lanka that was marginalized by a Sinhala nationalist majoritarian state in post-colonial times. As they tell it, the Tigers are brave rebels fighting for national liberation. In reality, the LTTE uses suicide bombs, civilian shields, and assassination to win political and territorial turf.

The LTTE, despite its decreasing popularity with Tamils within Sri Lanka, has been able to survive this long owing to one thing: the unquestioning support of the global Tamil diaspora. For more than two decades, the pro-Tiger diaspora has fueled the conflict in Sri Lanka, raising funds for the insurgents through coercion and threats. The LTTE gradually brought under its aegis most Tamil businesses and cultural organizations, sealing its control over community life in countries such as the United States, Canada, and Britain. Influential nationalists have carefully developed this pliant support base. Thus, it was easy to mobilise thousands of protestors for prolonged periods of time on the Tigers' behalf.

This is precisely why others have been loath to join in the protests throughout the Western world. The Tamil diaspora community is isolated by its own nationalism. Co-opted by the LTTE, it has made no contribution to peace. While the ravages of war encouraged Tamils in Sri Lanka to rethink the LTTE's secessionist project, the diaspora embraced it even more firmly, not having been affected by the collateral damage of that war directly.

Unfortunately, the international community bought into the notion that the LTTE represented the Tamils for years. During the last cease-fire agreement signed in 2002, negotiators -- hesitant to risk a new outbreak of violence -- were silent as the Tigers brutally repressed Tamil dissent and alternative leadership. If the LTTE are indeed crushed, as the government promises, there will be a political vacuum at the helm of the Tamil community. Searching for someone to fill the void, Western policymakers have turned to the pro-secession representatives of the diaspora. Hence, the government, which does not hesitate to conflate Tamil civilians with the LTTE, has cynically presented international mediation efforts as tantamount to support for the Tigers. The government sells this case to the majority Sinhala community -- whose support it needs for the war. And when it looks to China, India, and Iran for support, it can claim to be standing up to the bullying tactics of the ex-colonial, neo-imperial powers.

As Sri Lanka's humanitarian crisis unfolds, the international community must make its message clear and forthright. The Tigers and the diaspora that supports them have no claim as the "sole representation" of the Tamil people. Nor is secession a reasonable option. Anything more superficial than this firm engagement will play into the hands of the LTTE lobby in the West -- and inflame Sinhala nationalists in Sri Lanka. Only this firm message will serve the cause of peace and democracy.

The author herself is a Tamil expat. I like her point about expat Tamils adopting a far more extreme position than Sinhalese Tamils because of their distance from the actual conflicts. Rick Salutin has an interesting piece in the Globe about "group memory" and how younger group members, often not directly involved with a given event, assign it a much greater role in their lives. I guess it is like 2nd generation Italian immigrants in Woodbridge sometimes opting for a hyperstereotyped South Italian style with greased hair and track pants, even though not many people actually dress like that in Italy.

 

[kEiThZ]

^ It's a fairly well known fact. It's not just the Tiger sympathies, it's more than that. There's a trial on right now for arms fundraising by the World Tamil Movement. It's highly likely that the Conservative decision to ban the LTTE has probably helped end the conflict. Most analysts agree that before that ban a good chunk of the funding was coming from Canada, and mostly from Toronto.

 

[urbanfan89]

I don't know how pervasive this is, but second-generation people of an immigrant community tend to be more nationalistic than the original immigrants from what I've seen.

 

[kEiThZ]

^ Very true. And its the same among the various South Asian communities. With Pakistani muslim youth in the UK or tamils in Toronto or Punjabis in Vancouver. It's no different than the Bosnians, Serbs and Croat expats and their warmongering in the motherland in the 90's.

 

[Epi]

I don't know how pervasive this is, but second-generation people of an immigrant community tend to be more nationalistic than the original immigrants from what I've seen.

I wouldn't just blame immigrants. It's 2nd generation people removed from a conflict.

In the 1950s the Chinese people didn't protest against Japan, but young Chinese in China who were born 30 years after WWII did just a few years ago.

When you are not directly there, you tend to see everything through rose-coloured glasses and miss all the little nuances of events.

 

[golodhendil]

I wouldn't just blame immigrants. It's 2nd generation people removed from a conflict.

In the 1950s the Chinese people didn't protest against Japan, but young Chinese in China who were born 30 years after WWII did just a few years ago.

When you are not directly there, you tend to see everything through rose-coloured glasses and miss all the little nuances of events.

China was embroiled in a civil war for much of the late 40s and 50s, and mainland China was subsequently trapped in PRC quagmire (like the Cultural Revolution) for the next 20 years, so mainland Chinese commoners really did not have much luxury to discuss the Japanese issues. It can also be argued that a lot of the anti-Japanese sentiment in mainland China right now is fanned by the PRC gov't as a political tool.

But from the beginning of Japanese political and military aggression in the 1890s up to the end of WWII, common Chinese people have never stopped protesting against Japan, and that has been kept up in HK nonstop right till today, especially after controversies were renewed in the 70s with the Diaoyutai issue. So it certainly isn't true that anti-Japanese sentiment among the Chinese (and Koreans) is a new phenomenon. If anything, the current generation who grew up with Japanese anime and toys and culture are much less anti-Japan then their parent's generation.

 

[smuncky]

Tamil Protest video

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1632714912?bctid=23376017001

 

[waterloowarrior]

Scarborough fire related to Sri Lankan conflict, monk says
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/635432
Several thousand Tamil demonstrators occupied parts of downtown Toronto for several hours last night prior to a planned candlelit vigil outside the United States consulate on University Ave.
May 16, 2009 03:40 PM
MADELEINE WHITE
IAIN MARLOW
STAFF REPORTERS

A Buddhist monk believes a suspected arson at a temple in Scarborough is related to the ongoing conflict in Sri Lanka.

The fire sent three monks running for safety from the building on Kingston Rd. just south of Military Trail Rd., at about 4:30 a.m. after its east emergency entrance was found burning. Police and the Ontario Fire Marshal's Office are investigating.

Nalaka, a resident monk, said he believes the incident is connected to the war in Sri Lanka. He also said the monks have been threatened in the last week.

The incident has caused upset across Toronto's Sinhalese community.

"Every single Sinhalese person is Toronto is calling each other right now," said a man who attends the temple but did not want to be named. "It's very alarming."

Fire investigator James Gillespie estimates damage at $20-30,000. Police are looking at two bottles found near the door which may have been filled with accelerant, he said.

Members of the Sinhalese Buddhist community gathered outside the temple this afternoon said they had no doubts about who was responsible: Canadian Tamil Tigers supporters.

Bundula Jayasekara, Sri Lanka's Consul General in Toronto, said the Sinhalese Sri-Lankan residents in Toronto have been threatened for years.

"There is a Mafia," Jaysekara said, speaking of some Toronto Tamils who he said support the Tigers. "People don't feel safe here and this is a G8 country."

Bundara Seneviratne, vice president of the Toronto Buddhist Centre, said the temple has received threatening phone calls for weeks. A note posted to a door about two weeks ago referred to the ongoing Tamil protest downtown.

"I suspect this may be the beginning of some worse things," he said.

Senthan Nada, a spokesperson for the Coalition to Stop the War in Sri Lanka, said today Canadian Tamils do support the Tamil Tigers because they represent the "aspirations of the Tamil people." But Nada stressed local Tamils have been interested solely in peaceful protests and trying to engage Canadian politicians, not in violence.

"It's a police inquiry," he said, adding that any accusations Tamils are responsible for setting the fire would be "false allegations."

Nada said: "This is not something the community is interested in doing."

But at the fire scene, Kumar Gunasekera, 32, said members of Toronto's Tamil community have been indoctrinated by the Tamil Tigers.

"They're calling Prabakharn their leader," he said, referring to the leader of the Tamil Tigers, a wanted terrorist.

The fire comes less than a week after the main Buddhist temple of the Sri Lankan Buddhist community in France was attacked on May 10. Extensive damage was caused during the incident. The Asian Tribune is reporting monks and community leaders believe it was organized by the international network of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

Friday night the Sri Lankan government announced it took control of the island's entire coastline and hoped to end the conflict with the Tamil rebels by the end of the weekend.

Meanwhile, several thousand Tamil demonstrators occupied parts of downtown Toronto for several hours last night prior to a planned candlelight vigil outside the United States consulate on University Ave.

For a time, the demonstrators blocked part of the intersection of Yonge and Dundas Sts., refusing to move until they could be addressed by a federal Conservative MP.

Police estimate there are about 400 protesters out this morning and have no information as to whether the crowd will grow throughout the day.

"Because of the weather, it's dissipating a little bit," 52 Division Staff Sgt. Robert Brown said. "I don't know if that's going to be the trend for the day."

With files from Thandiwe Vela

 

[kEiThZ]

^ Terrorist attacks are a real possibility by angry Tamil groups here on in. Especially against their opponents.

 

[Amphibius]

Is this really the best way to achieve support for your cause? Piss off enough of the general public til we start banging on politicians' doors, demanding they do something to rectify this. Hopefully the end is near though:
--

After 70,000 dead, Tigers surrender in war-weary Sri Lanka

DOUG SAUNDERS

From Monday's Globe and Mail

E-mail Doug Saunders | Read Bio | Latest Columns
May 17, 2009 at 11:28 PM EDT

The 26-year civil war that has fractured Sri Lanka has come to a horrific close, with the surviving Tamil Tiger rebel leaders declaring an end to their struggle to build a breakaway military state, their all-controlling leader reported dead, and their dwindling rump of fighters surrounded by the burnt corpses of thousands of civilians.

A few holdout fighters were trapped last night on a tiny strip of sand and scrub, less than 600 metres across, that until the surrender had been the last vestige of Tamil Eelam, the totalitarian linguistic-minority breakaway state the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had spent decades building and defending.

As the Sri Lankan military shelled, bombed and shot its way into this barren but densely populated strip of land on the edge of the Indian Ocean, there were celebrations further south on the streets of Colombo, the island nation's capital.

In other capitals, and in the office of United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, there were grave criticisms of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa for a campaign of unprecedented violence that appeared to ignore humanitarian concerns and the Geneva Conventions as the Sri Lankan military bombed and shelled tens of thousands of Tamil civilians whose homes and lives are intermixed with the Tiger forces. There have been at least 7,000 civilian casualties in the north.

The final struggle yesterday may have killed Velupillai Prabhakaran, the military strongman and LTTE chief who tried to turn the northern and eastern fringes of the tiny island into a state for the Tamil-speaking minority. Unconfirmed reports from Tamil and Sri Lankan sources reported yesterday that his corpse had been found amidst the burned-out wreckage.

The battle has also created 250,000 refugees, many of them wounded, who cannot return to homes and lives that in most cases had been the property of an all-consuming military regime that no longer exists. They are victims of both the LTTE's strict and punitive regime and of Colombo's military, and their future lives are tragically uncertain.

In the final hours of the struggle yesterday, LTTE forces had resorted to a tactic they had introduced to the world decades ago, the suicide bombing, and there are fears that vestigial squads of Tamil separatists will soon launch a terrorist campaign across the island.

This has led the government to restrict the freedoms of the refugees, locking them behind barbed wire and strictly controlling movement. There are grave fears of a self-perpetuating spiral of violence and ethnic polarization that could prove worse than the civil war itself.

That this seemingly endless war has come to such an explosive and complete end is a reflection of the way the world has changed in the past few years.

When Mr. Rajapaksa came to power at the end of 2005, he began speaking of the struggle between Sri Lanka's Sinhalese-speaking majority and militants from its Tamil-speaking minority using a new language adapted from the struggles against al-Qaeda in Washington and London. He enlisted the help of then-U.S.-president George W. Bush, who listed the Tamil Tigers as a part of the global terrorist threat.

Suddenly, this long-running civil war was part of the Bush administration's “war on terror.” At the same time, the ethnic breakaway state, that bloody staple of 20th-century politics, was losing its appeal in international circles.

But the Tigers themselves are also victims of a changing world. The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami struck the Tamil heartland hard, killing tens of thousands of people, a great many of them children who were being raised in orphanages to serve in the LTTE's forces. It also destroyed the entire fleet of the Sea Tigers, the LTTE's once-formidable navy. The Tigers once had support in India and other countries, but this dissolved fast in the 1990s after LTTE squads assassinated Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa. Tamil-speaking Muslims, once a core community in the LTTE-controlled east, broke with the separatist movement and became targets of Tiger attacks, further alienating potential supporters.

A top LTTE commander, Colonel Karuna, defected in 2004, taking a sizable part of the Tiger military command with him. His faction, supportive of the Sri Lankan government, helped turn the country's south-eastern coast into a largely government-loyal region.

In his 2005 election campaign, Mr. Rajapaksa put aside years of delicate peace negotiations, many of them negotiated by Canadians (Bob Rae, the current Liberal foreign-affairs critic, had been a negotiator), ended efforts, mostly unsuccessful, to offer the Tamils a Quebec-style semi-autonomous status, and vowed in his election campaign to put an end to the Tiger problem forever.

He soon ended the ceasefire that had allowed the island's economy to return to a tentative normality in the first half of this decade. With a tsunami-weakened LTTE and a government bolstered by international aid, a total war was launched.

With heavy arms and aircraft provided by China, missiles made in Slovakia and tactics learned from U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan (the United States suspended military aid in 2007 amidst human-rights concerns), the Sri Lankan army launched its fourth and deadliest major campaign against the Tigers starting in January this year.

The putative capital of Tamil Eelam, the inland city of Kilinochchi, was quickly overwhelmed, and the Tigers retreated to their beach hideout on a thin strip of land north of the coastal city of Mullaitivu, an area that was almost totally destroyed in the tsunami. They took tens of thousands of civilians with them, reportedly force-marching them along the highways of the north.

The climax of the war was reached late yesterday, when the LTTE announced the surrender on its website. “This battle has reached its bitter end,” LTTE official Selvarajah Pathmanathan said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press. “It is our people who are dying now from bombs, shells, illness and hunger. We cannot permit any more harm to befall them. We remain with one last choice – to remove the last weak excuse of the enemy for killing our people. We have decided to silence our guns.”

Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said the Canadian government is committed to seeking a political settlement in Sri Lanka.

“What we need here is some kind of an agreement that is going to … set these issues to rest after 25 years,” he told CTV's Question Period yesterday. “We've been calling for a long-term political settlement of these issues, and that's Canada's position. We still promote that, we still believe in it.”

Norwegian negotiators announced yesterday that the Tigers had agreed to hand over their weapons to a third party. The final 72,000 civilians fled the conflict zone, thousands of them wading across a shallow lagoon from the sandspit, many bandaged and limping.

The fighting continued well into the night, and may continue for several days, but officials on both sides said that there no longer seems to be anyone commanding the remaining Tamil fighters. The war is over, but the most difficult struggle is likely to begin today.

 

[cdr108]

Now that the Tigers have surrendered and Velupillai Prabhakaran, the military strongman and LTTE chief has been supposedly killed ...

do you think:
1) the protests will end; or
2) will we continue to see protests, and
3) violent attacks against Sinhalese Canadians as retribution?

 

[Maggie]

do you think:
1) the protests will end; or
2) will we continue to see protests, and
3) violent attacks against Sinhalese Canadians as retribution?

most likely a combination of 2 and 3 I can for see. They have broken my spirit and am going to join there cause. If anyone has a gun may I borrow it please and I will also need a map since I have no idea where this place is. Also does anyone know of a good Sri Lankan restaurant where I can get a few tips on what to look for when I arrive there.

 

[nfitz]

It depends what happens over there. If things stop over there, it will stop here. If the Sinhalese continue to massacre innocents over there, then it will continue; I doubt that they will continue that though ... but the racism of the Sinhalese is well documented in the past, and it wil be interesting to see if they will sore be winners or not.

Generally though, this seems to be good news. The death of Prabhakaran may well be the only thing that will end this travesty.

 

[Brian69]

Good to see the Tigers are finished as a military force but will likely make news from time to time with guerrilla style attacks or suicide bombings. Their overseas networks are still intact and others will likely go there to fill the void.

Over here it sounds like the mood has changed--more sombre and reflective. I don't expect attacks on Sinhalese citizens in the GTA because the attack on the Buddhist temple no more represents Tamils than nazi vandalism in a Jewish cemetery here represents white protestants. A few hotheads causing a single incident doesn't represent an entire people and I don't expect much from here on in. I certainly hope that's the end of it. While I'm more concerned about the protests continuing I think they'll dissipate once things stabilize in Sri Lanka. But I imagine this will take weeks and we might see a few more smaller scale protests before then.

I'm also rather glad the Tiger leadership including Prabhakaran were apparently wiped out because anything that replaces it can't be worse than what came before. With luck a more moderate Tamil voice may emerge from this war.

 

[kEiThZ]

Now that the LTTE is destroyed the world can finally step in. It is imperative that the international community help Sri Lanka find a political solution. Perhaps Bob Rae's plan should be put forward again. Canadian style federalism would adress a lot of the Tamils grievances in Sri Lanka.