On 2 June 2009 Canadian Tamils convened by the thousands in Ottawa for yet another demonstration. The multitude of protests in recent months in Toronto and Ottawa has left many lingering questions in the minds of Canadians. Until the local Tamil population began protesting here in Canada, many Canadians were not even aware of the ongoing conflict in Sri Lanka. Unfortunately, media reporting has made the protestors and their methods the topic of discussion rather than the war in Sri Lanka.

To associate the protestors with the "terrorist" designation distracts from the real issue: the killing of the innocents by the Sri Lankan Government and the reluctance of the International Community (IC) to intervene. Canadian Tamils are protesting for Social Justice in Sri Lanka. In exercising a fundamental right of Canadian citizenship, they are helping to bring awareness to their fellow Canadians of one of the longest conflicts in the world.

The conflict in Sri Lanka has its root in the social and economic suppression of Tamil minorities decades before the war. The Sinhalese and Tamils had their own kingdoms which were merged under colonial European rule. When the Europeans left, Sri Lanka had a Sinhalese majority that went about discriminating its Tamil minorities. It disfranchised a million Tamils and by 1956 Sinhala language was made the official language of the country. Further ‘standardization’ and ‘colonial housing’ schemes discriminated Tamils from University education and deprived them of farming lands.

Tamils protested peacefully in Sri Lanka in a manner similar to that led by Gandhi in India. The government countered it with violent race riots, often led by Ministers and MPs who had the government electoral list to identify Tamil residences and businesses. In the most brutal ones in 1958 and 1983, several thousand Tamils were killed and their properties damaged.

By the late 1970s the Tamil militancy replaced the non-violent protestors. And so the Tamils turned to the advocacy of the gun to win them the rights they were deprived which they had failed to get when they adhered to peaceful and lawful methods of the country.

The next three decades saw a war that ravaged the Tamil inhabited lands and took the lives of over 100,000 civilians, almost exclusively Tamils. Several Western Countries, who had till then ignored the Tamil problems, banned the Tamil militants as 'terrorists'. Ironically, the ‘anti-terrorist’ state measures were more terrorizing than the ‘terrorist’ insurgency itself. In the pretext of waging a war against terrorism, and with the support of the IC at large, the Sri Lankan Army routed the militants last month with total disregard for human causalities.

Even after the war, Sri Lanka has rounded up over 300,000 civilians from the conflict area and has forcibly confined them in what is being described as 'concentration like camps'. In these camps that are off-limits to the media, some 13,000 are believed to have been 'disappeared' [2]. As the departing Chief Justice of Sri Lanka commented on these refugees, "They live outside the protection of the law of the country" [3].

The comments of the Chief Justice, in fact, sum up the state for Tamil minorities in the country. There is a problem in Sri Lanka and it is an ethnic problem. The problem is the lack of social justice for the Tamil population. The militancy and LTTE are not the problem but a symptom of that problem. By defeating the LTTE, the Sri Lankan Army has merely addressed a symptom of a problem. Without the intervention of external pressure, the problem will not be addressed but rather swept under the mat and hidden.

The protestors that poured onto the streets of Toronto and Ottawa were once victims of this problem. They fled, and were fortunate to have found the sanctuaries of countries such as Canada. During the course of the war, they had contacts with their kin and kith and so they knew the details of Sri Lankan army atrocities. They feel helpless but yet resolved that they cannot watch aside when their loved ones are dying in numbers each day. And so, when the situation got worse, they took to the streets.

Students were at the forefront of these protests and many de-enrolled from their university semesters. Very young and having been raised Canadian, they sought to bring forward the problem in a Canadian way. The older generation may have been skeptical in the beginning, having done their fair share of protests in Sri Lanka with no yields but only scars. But in the young ones the community saw the resolve to withstand the cold and rally behind them.

The protests were intended to inform and bring awareness. In a way they wanted to fill in the gap they felt was being caused by media coverage that was either biased or lacked context. Being banned from the conflict, many media resorted to recycling the news that came out of the defence ministry of Sri Lanka. As the war raged further havoc, the protesters sought attention and the intervention of anyone and everyone. They were often shunned and ignored, but they couldn’t give-up because the fire back home was still burning violently.

This war had many victors (politicians and profiteers) and an entire people vanquished. Tamils all over the world are counting the dead amongst their relatives. They suspect a certain massacre of untold magnitude took place on the beaches of the no-fire zones in the dying days of the war. Reports attest that as many as 20,000 were massacred. [2] As one departing aid worker commented "The high number of casualties was caused by a generous use of weapons, such as cluster and chemical bombs, that are banned by international treaties."

Their suspicion is vindicated and their frustration ever rising with suspicion that the UN special envoy had known about a massacre of 20,000. [2] The UN reacted to the allegation weakly by claiming ‘they stopped counting the dead’ and that there was no credible evidence. One cannot wake someone who pretends to be asleep. To Canada’s credit, it was one of the few countries that had urged for an independent probe into Sri Lanka at the UN, but in a failing cause.

As for Canadian Tamils, their agony is not over. They have lost so many and still stand to loose many more in the coming many years. Their people have gone through so much and they show a terrible scar. Perhaps in vain, but in hope that one day justice will arrive for those there are and those there are not, the Tamils continue to protest.

Sources:

1) http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0902368.htm
2) http://www.innercitypress.com/untrip3may3srilanka060209.html
3) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6441067.ece
4) http://www.flickr.com/photos/38247710@N06/3594739791