Regrouping

Tamils find their voice after Sri Lanka’s civil war

(CBC News)

Logan Logendralingam is taking a break, although you wouldn't know it, given the barrage of phone calls and staff interruptions he fields. The editor of one of Canada's largest Tamil newspapers, Uthayan — a Scarborough, Ont., weekly —Logendralingam can be forgiven all the distractions. He was on deadline to put out his newspaper and also to help solve a crime. On a recent Saturday night in February, somebody smashed the entire plate glass front of his newspaper offices, apparently to protest against an editorial decision. An anonymous phone call came Sunday morning, blasting Logendralingam in Tamil for not writing about a meeting that recently took place between the Canadian-Sri Lanka Business Council and Sri Lanka's president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, in Colombo.

No one was hurt by this protest but the editor of the moderate weekly is frustrated at being threatened, yet again, particularly for something he didn't publish.

"I'm a victim for doing nothing," he says.

Such is the state of play in a community still riven by the aftershocks of a civil war, even one thousands of kilometres from the actual field of conflict.

It has been almost a year since the Sri Lankan army crushed the insurgent Tamil Tigers, ending a 26-year civil war and only now is the international Tamil community — in Canada and around the world —starting to find its voice.

Accustomed to bullying

At this point, it is not known who smashed up Uthayan's front windows.

But, says Logendralingam, Canada's large Tamil community is accustomed to being bullied, in the past by supporters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the armed group that fought for a separate Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka.

That bloody war ended in May 2009 with a crushing blow to the Tigers and the dreams of nationhood in pieces — at least for the foreseeable future.

Back in Sri Lanka, more than 100,000 Tamils are still in internment camps, while thousands of suspected Tigers are in prison and Tamils face little prospect that the government in Colombo will address their historic grievances.

The collapse of the LTTE seems to have also brought about a sea change for a people used to being boxed in by extremist propaganda and pressure.

But even as the public conversation among Tamils opens up, there are worries that remnants of the Tigers movement could still cause trouble.

The International Crisis Group, one of the world's pre-eminent think tanks, says, in a report released in February, that the rebels' defeat has left Tamils around the world feeling "powerless, betrayed by the West, demanding justice and, in some cases, wanting revenge."

The report goes on to say that there are no signs that any remaining LTTE adherents are planning attacks. But it quotes unnamed Canadian law enforcement authorities who are concerned that, if left unchecked, a few remaining Tigers could carry out publicity seeking atrocities on a large scale. A huge blow

That view has been dismissed as speculation by the Canadian Tamil Congress, an organization that claims to be the voice of Toronto's Tamils.

But Logendralingam, for one, says that there is no doubt the Tigers' demise is a huge blow to many Tamils and Tiger sympathizers in Canada and abroad.

"They were thinking, when LTTE existed that we were are very close to a separate state," he says. "They thought tomorrow or next year.

"They had a navy, a small air force and an army. They had support from all over the world and thought they could achieve it. That's why they gave their support. That's why they gave money."

But it's not the only reason Tamils gave money to LTTE.

Tiger supporters in Toronto's huge Tamil community, the largest in the Western diaspora, also pressured or extorted money from their people and dominated the ethnic media.

With the Tigers' defeat, fear is lifting, according to Ignatius Selliah, one of a handful of Tamil journalists in Canada who were openly against the LTTE.

When the war ended last year, "there was a huge crack in the opinion of the diaspora," Selliah says, noting that the numbers of Tamil demonstrators in Canada and Australia are way down and that the conversation in the local Tamil media has opened up.

"Now there are different opinions," he says. "There is debate."

Selliah says he is now hearing things like "We can't talk about a separate state," or "We wasted so much money!" Topics that were virtually taboo in the past.

Global forum

To keep the dream of self-determination alive, a Global Tamil Forum was held in London at the end of February, a forum attended by Britain's foreign minister and members of the Canadian Tamil Congress.

Canadian officials did not attend but the federal government has said Sri Lanka remains a priority.

In early March, Deepak Obhrai, parliamentary secretary to the Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, met with Sri Lanka's new High Commissioner to Canada, Chitranganee Wagiswara, and pressed for a swift resettlement of Tamil refugees from the internment camps.

Obhrai also urged Sri Lanka to begin a reconciliation process with the Tamils.

Resettlement is one of the Global Tamil Forum's main aims as well. But the forum's leadership is still pushing for self-determination for Tamils in their traditional areas in the north and east of Sri Lanka, this time through non-violence and democracy.

"If they uphold those principles they can ask the international community to push the Sri Lankan government to do the same thing," says Manjula Selvarajah, media coordinator for the Canadian Tamil Congress.

But Tamils who rejected the LTTE may not rush to the Global Forum as one of its founders is a Tamil Catholic priest, Father J.S. Emmanual, who once likened Tiger suicide bombers to martyrs. No less attractive may be the Transnational Government of Tamil Elam, which was set up by the overseas wing of the LTTE last July to pursue self-rule, an idea that has no support among foreign governments or among defeated Tamils in Sri Lanka.

The provisional government has been mocked in Tamil newspaper columns and called a dangerous exercise "cornering the Tamils again into the pernicious politics of half truths."

For the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum, a group founded in Toronto in 2002, the end of the war at least raises the prospect of opening a dialogue between Tamils and the Sinhalese majority that didn't exist while the Tigers were active.

A moderate voice, the SLDF, is calling for the democratization of Sri Lanka in a pluralistic society. But it says the government must address minority rights in the country.

For Toronto Tamils, having been promised so much in the past by expatriate leaders and then seeing how much Tamils are still suffering, they're more cautious about where they put their support, says Logendralingam.

Tamils want a change in Sri Lanka, he says. "But what can be done from this land? It's a question most of the people have.

"They used to support everything. Now, whenever somebody wants support they think first. They are thinking whether it will work or not."