The tiger in the eye of the storm

ERIN ANDERSSEN AND CAMPBELL CLARK

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

OTTAWA — Fathima Charles has been here all night, standing against the barricade, staring at the Peace Tower and willing someone – anyone – to hear her story. She cannot tell it without crying, but, as her husband explains, the tears flow constantly these days.

For eight months, she has not heard from her five sisters, her little brother and her mother caught in the war zone in Sri Lanka as the fighting has escalated. Her phone calls go unanswered. Her appeals to the Red Cross lead nowhere. She imagines the worst: that they have starved, that they lie dead and nameless.

“Every family is like this,” says Ms. Charles, 40. “We can't stay home. We can't do nothing.”

For nearly two weeks, the Tamil Canadians have held their protest on the sidewalk across from the Parliament Buildings, travelling from Toronto and Montreal, many sleeping in their cars. A small group remains on a hunger strike, bundled under blankets in a makeshift tent. During the first few days, the crowd was large enough to stop downtown traffic; yesterday morning, during rush hour, there were about 50 people, still chanting.

“Canada!” a hoarse voice shouted into a megaphone.

“Don't be silent,” the crowd answered back.

Their protest has been greeted, for the most part, with silence – not one politician, the group said, has ventured into the crowd to speak with them. The closest they have come to a meeting happened yesterday morning, when Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis, standing on the other side of the street, passed on word that he would like to talk to the hunger strikers, one of whom he'd heard is a constituent. But after several minutes of negotiation, he headed back to the Hill.

The reason for the silence: Fathima Charles, like many others at the protest, is waving a red flag with a roaring tiger, and she will not put it down – this is the symbol of her people, she argues, and their struggle for independence. The flag, with its circle of bullets and crisscrossed machine guns, has become identified with the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist organization banned in Canada. And no politician wants to be seen standing in close proximity to one, however many more Maple Leafs are flying beside them.

But the protest, which the Tamil community has vowed to continue indefinitely, will become more difficult to ignore when MPs return to Parliament on Monday after a two-week break. Behind the chanting crowd stand an estimated 300,000 Tamil Canadians, with those in Toronto forming the world's largest expatriate community of Tamils. Most of them have family members squeezed into a tiny patch of northern Sri Lanka with rebel fighters under fire as the Sri Lankan military moves into land historically held by the country's Tamil minority.

It is a humanitarian crisis in the making, and so far, after months of fighting, the furthest the Canadian government has gone officially is a statement by Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, calling for a ceasefire – a significant shift for the Conservatives, but not far enough for the Tamil community.

The taint of terrorism has tempered the political reaction to the crisis, leaving many Tamil Canadians, who have been in Canada for decades and whose children were raised or born here, feeling abandoned by their country.

“When it's election time, they come to our community. When they want votes, they come to us,” says Sujee Mano, 22, a criminology student at Carleton University. “But when we come to them, I don't see any representation.”

EXPATRIATES' DILEMMA

Just a few years ago, it appeared that Canada's Tamils were on the verge of becoming the new ethnic force in Canadian politics, with Tamil organizers starting to flex community muscle by recruiting members and nomination slates for leadership battles in political parties, just as Italian Canadians, Greek Canadians and more recently Sikh Indo-Canadians have done.

The Liberals wooed Tamil support in the 1990s but faced sharp criticism for being too close to groups that were alleged Canadian fronts for the Tigers. When the Conservatives won the election in 2006 – while losing in every Toronto-area riding where Tamil votes could decide the outcome – they banned the Tigers, following the same post-9/11 decision by the United States and the European Union.

In the meantime, hostilities in Sri Lanka exploded, pushing politicians into a conflict far more complex than that of a democratic government defending itself against terrorist attackers, especially since an unfruitful peace process was dropped.

The Sri Lankan government has been cited for human-rights violations – arbitrary arrests, discrimination against the Tamil minority, and, according to a 2008 report by the U.S. State Department, the condoning of paramilitary groups “credibly alleged” to have attacked civilians and practised torture and kidnappings. The tactics of the Tamil Tigers have been no more palatable – including pioneering the use of suicide bombs and recruiting child soldiers – and here in Canada, members of the group have been linked to extortion. Recent reports have suggested that both the Sri Lankan military and the Tamil Tigers are preventing the movement of civilians caught between them.

But on the sidewalks in Ottawa, nearly every Tamil Canadian tells the story of relatives gone missing, or left beaten on the street at the hands of the government. And the only thing keeping their families safe now, many believe, are the Tigers.

“How do you expect them to fight? It's not a suicide bomb – it's a self-sacrifice,” says Vin Mahalingam, 63, an electrical engineer who came to Canada in 1982 to give his three children a better life. “If the freedom fighters weren't there, none of us would be here. They are our protectors.”

But that case has been difficult to make to the Conservatives, who are reluctant to criticize the government in Colombo for fear of being cast as flip-floppers – even as the disturbing nature of that government's rights record became increasingly clear.

The Liberals, meanwhile, have been reluctant to press too hard, for fear of being seen pandering to terrorists – particularly after MP Gurbax Singh Malhi was publicly berated in Question Period, after being spotted at a rally where Tiger flags were flying. When MP Derek Lee was asked by Tamil constituents to invite members of Parliament to an Ottawa rally, his note took pains to mention – not once but three times – that the organizers are not affiliated with the Tigers.

“We've neutered each other,” sighed one Liberal MP. “That is essentially what it's come down to.”

But MP Paul Calandra, a Conservative whose Markham riding office has received so many calls from Tamil Canadians he chose to host a town hall to field questions, draws a hard line: “The Tamils have accomplished a hell of a lot in this country in 25 years, but they have to allow themselves to be identified as hard-working, law-abiding Canadians … and not allow themselves to be identified via the Tigers. I think there's been a setback with the protest on the Hill.”

That's a tough sell, particularly for many younger Tamils frustrated with Canada's silence. Manoliraj Selvanayagam, a 20-year-old from Brampton in a Tamil Tiger T-shirt who has been spending the night on Ottawa streets since April 7, says: “In our parents time, they would say, ‘We're decent people, we've got to act decent, we've got to respect the community, blah, blah, blah, blah.' But they all did that and what happened?”

The Tamil Canadians standing in the street day and night, hoisting posters of wounded children and bloody bodies, believe this is the only way they can be heard. For them, the debate about the nature of the Tamil Tigers has become largely irrelevant: They want their families to be safe.

“No one is giving a voice to us,” says Mr. Mahalingam. “We are getting frustrated. But compared to the atrocities going on to our kin, this is nothing.”

Standing beside him, Mr. Mano glances at the Peace Tower, and says more softly: “Our people should go into politics more.”