Last Monday, 120,000 people from Tamil communities across the GTA formed a seven-kilometre human chain to demand that Canada recognize the Tamil Tigers as a liberation group and a voice for Sri Lanka’s embattled Tamil minority.
A crowd of people gathered at Union Station in the afternoon to show strong support for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who are currently locked in a decades-long battle with Sri Lankan forces.
Ramya Janandharan, the awareness coordinator for St. George campus’s Tamil Students’ Association, led a group of student demonstrators but was careful to say that she attended the protest to express her personal beliefs. The TSA has no official position for or against the LTTE, preferring to let its members choose for themselves.
“As a TSA we did not take a stance. But we believe the LTTE is the Tamil nation’s only hope for lasting peace,” she said.
Kiruba Kulaveerasindum, a Toronto man who joined student demonstrators at U of T, called the Tamil Tigers “freedom fighters” and accused the Sri Lankan government of perpetrating genocide on its Tamil population.
“[The government] is not at war, they want to destroy the Tamil nation,” he said.
Demonstrators gathered signatures for a petition to have the LTTE taken off Canada’s list of terrorist organizations. Janandharan told The Varsity that organizers plan to send copies of the petition to Prime Minister Harper and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. The LTTE have been banned as a criminal organization in Canada for three years.
Last month, a former president of the Canadian Tamil Students’ Association pled guilty in a U.S. court to facilitating a $900,000 weapons deal to supply the Tigers with guns and surface-to-air missile launchers.
Former U of T student Sathajhan Sarachandran is awaiting sentencing along with former Waterloo student Suresh Sriskandarajah. Each faces a sentence of 25 years to life.
