In late January, members of Toronto’s Tamil immigrant community formed a human chain across the city’s downtown core to decry the civilian fallout of the recent Sri Lankan military surge against separatist rebels, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). A string of protesters almost six kilometres in length and 50,000 in number, they waved placards, raised banners, and chanted slogans, calling on the Canadian government to intervene in a conflict they called “genocide.”
The majority of the demonstrations centred around Union Station. An estimated 30,000 had convened on Front Street, bringing traffic to a standstill. PA systems amplified children’s voices as they made pleas for justice. These words were quickly whipped into impassioned mantras by the crowd. Resolute student activists with megaphones and women overcome with grief held up pictures of the dead and wounded. The image of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa appeared on mounted signposts underneath the words “War Criminal.” There was not a single mention of the Tamil Tigers.
“This rally is not pro-Tigers,” a demonstrator informs me. “It isn’t anti-Tigers either. In fact, I don’t even want to talk about the Tigers at all.”
This sentiment shouldn’t be surprising. With the Sri Lankan forces poised to deal a deathblow to the rebel organization within months, the Tamil civilian population of Northern Sri Lanka (250,000 of which resides within the primary war zone) is increasingly in the crossfire. The government has sealed them off from humanitarian aid, medical attention, and their expat families. Hundreds of civilians have been killed or displaced from their homes by the fighting, taking limited shelter in the surrounding jungles. For many Tamils, this is a grievous abuse of human rights, the culmination of a quarter century of ethnic prejudice and oppression.
The Tamil separatist movement gained momentum in the 1970s as a reaction to the ethno-religious tensions rising in the wake of the country’s independence from Britain in 1948. A succession of Buddhist-Sinhalese governments followed, reversing the privilege historically bestowed upon the minority Tamil population by the British colonialists, which they considered disproportionate. To this effect, Tamils were persecuted by the political and education systems. The Sinhalese language, Sinhala, was recognized as the only official language of Sri Lanka and measures were put in place to severely limit Tamils’ ability to enter university and to prevent their immigration. Buddhism became the official state religion, curtailing the religious freedoms of all religious minorities, including the mostly Hindu Tamils. The segregation of the Tamil people became systematic, sowing the seeds of discontent that would result in the formation of the LTTE by 1980.
Since then, the LTTE’s extremist approach—political assassinations and pioneering the use of suicide bombers—has garnered sharp criticism. Today, the group has been denounced internationally as a terrorist organization. The various Sinhalese administrations have escaped these indictments, despite an appalling litany of atrocities and human rights violations spanning the better part of three decades. A watershed event in the escalating divisions between the Sinhalese and Tamils occurred during the 1983 pogrom, now known as Black July, in which orgiastic riots in Colombo left Tamil neighbourhoods ablaze, businesses looted, and over a thousand Tamil civilians murdered by Sinhalese mobs. Though then President Jayawardene’s administration was not officially blamed for the slaughter, the connection was never formally investigated and is commonly viewed by the Tamils as deeply suspect.
Suspicions were likely reawakened last month when Lasantha Wickrematunge, editor of the Sri Lankan independent newspaper The Sunday Leader, successfully predicted his own murder in an editorial. Citing the newspaper’s fiercely critical investigative coverage of the current Sri Lankan government, Wickrematunge said that his murder would be politically motivated, part of a wider effort to suppress and control the country’s media. A personal associate of President Rajapaksa, he addressed him personally: “In the wake of my death I know you will make all the usual sanctimonious noises […] But like all the inquiries you have ordered in the past, nothing will come of this one, too.”
Perhaps this despair, felt by countless others, inspired so many to unite across our nation and speak out in a way that their loved ones in Sri Lanka never could. It’s also likely that these protests were spurred by a desire to redraw the lines between the Tamil people and their de facto political representatives, a difference at times overlooked by the media. Whatever the reason, the message was clear: the Tamils are united, not by politics, but for peace.
