Tamils reap what they sowed: Canada’s National Post

By Jonathan Kay
Courtesy: The National Post

(May 06, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Note by the Editors of Sri Lanka Guardian: In a nutshell, Jonathan Kay of The National Post has presented the dilemma faced by the Tamils in Sri Lanka who have been hijacked by the LTTE with the support of the Tamil Diaspora who are ‘firmed’ in the LTTE Underworld that has developed over the years into a more powerful organization than the Sicilian mafia.

Just like Jaffna’s teenagers were brainwashed by the Tigers in the latter 1970s, university campus Tamils have been dragged into the LTTE by some vicious individuals who have now stepped back from the limelight and operating from the shadows. They certainly fear being deported. This is a very dangerous trend more because these young people are being encouraged to challenge law and order in the very countries that gave their families refuge.

The Tamil community lost great many moderates and among them Dr Neelan Tiruchelvam was a star of great hope. The entire community was terrorized from 1970s onwards by the very people who are being cheered by pro-LTTE demonstrators in the streets of Canada, UK and other countries.

This cancer has struck the South Indian state of Tamilnadu propagated mostly by Canadian funds. Unless India takes a strong stand, the LTTE menace could get encamped in Tamilnadu especially with the film-crazy joker politicians holding sway there.

Vast heaps of arms are being unearthed and discovered in the Wanni and how did the LTTE get all these? The UNP was so corrupt that it aided this operation to some extent and there were the shipping people connected to the LTTE like the Gnanakone family and of course the Norwegians.

News hounds in the west like Channel 4 out for sensations capitalize on snippets and make mountains out of them. The recent Channel 4 News made capital out by showing a certain clipping that is far from convincing; evidently it was a conniving conspiratorial construction.

It is easy get someone to talk what you want to hear with just a plate of Chinese fried rice. And then the interviewer in London got hot, rude and aggressive against a peaceful Sri Lankan High Commissioner. He behaved lacking all ethics and morals in journalism just to have his own way. It was pathetic to see someone totally ignorant of Eastern customs and behavioral norms with a mike in his hand. He seemed so keen to hold the Tiger flag just like the street demonstrators for the most brutal terrorist organization in the world.

Jonathan Kay has really understood what exactly is happening and the Sri Lanka Guardian acknowledges his feature as very timely and helpful.

All these years the LTTE in Canada thought the Liberal Party was their cause promoter. But this they have lost very much the way they lost people like Dr Neelan Tiruchelvam. We understand even Jack Layton of the NDP is having second thoughts about the LTTE and surely the Green Party will not want to know them. Will they therefore form their own party convinced they can send three members to the Canadian Parliament from Scarborough?

Or in sheer frustration will they take up arms in Canada? They have the funds, the shippers like the Gnanakone brothers and the Norwegians and even Britain’s Channel 4! They have a global underworld to protect.

The feature of Jonathan Kay:

The conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers has deep, tangled roots. But to a rough order of magnitude, the moral stakes can be reduced to a single act of terrorist savagery that took place on July 29, 1999 - the day Neelan Tiruchelvam was blown out the side of his Nissan sedan by a female suicide bomber riding a moped.

Tiruchelvam was a Sri Lankan Tamil, but not the kind that makes excuses for terrorism, or for the nihilistic death cult led by Tigers chief Velupillai Pirapaharan. Instead, he sought to bring justice and self-determination for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority through negotiation and constitutional reform. In Sri Lanka, he was an elected parliamentarian and the founder of two major think tanks. In the United States, he taught at Harvard University, enlightening Western students about human-rights abuses committed in Sri Lanka - by the nation's military and the Tigers alike.

He was a moderate, in other words - the Tamils' answer to Yitzhak Rabin or Nelson Mandela. And that's why he was assassinated: The Tigers despise any Tamil who does not share their commitment to war and terrorism. Tiger propaganda - including the terrorist group's own "poet laureate" - spent years vilifying Tiruchelvam as a traitor prior to his assassination. Muzhakkam, a Tiger-controlled newspaper here in Canada joined in the campaign.

The act serves as a grim metaphor for the war itself. Much as many Tamil-Canadians claim that the Sri Lankan government is engineering a "genocide," the greatest threat to the country's Tamils has been their professed protectors. The Tigers are the ones who have assassinated moderate Tamils, erected a murderous mini-dictatorship in the northern part of the island, abducted Tamil children to serve as terrorists and soldiers, and stolen tsunami-relief money to fund military operations. Now that the Tigers are cornered in northeastern Sri Lanka, the Tigers are holding tens of thousands of Tamil civilians as human shields - shooting them in the back as they seek to flee.

Tiruchelvam's sacrifice is remembered in the highest places - including right here in Canada. In fact, it helps explain why Michael Ignatieff has decisively reversed the Liberal party's traditionally soft stand on Tiger terror.

In the late 1980s, Tiruchelvam and Ignatieff were Harvard colleagues, preaching human rights from the same hymn book. When Tiruchelvam was blown up, Ignatieff traveled to Sri Lanka to deliver a lecture in the man's honour. A year later, he described the experience in a speech at the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression awards dinner in Toronto.

Neelan Tiruchelvam, Ignatieff declared, was "a man whose memory I revere." But that wasn't the prevailing view among many of the noisiest members of the Canadian Tamil community: "When the word got out that I was going to give a lecture in Colombo in his honour, I began to get very extraordinary bits of Tamil literature, mailed to me with a Canadian postmark. And the sum and substance of these newsletters was basically to say that Neelan, my good friend, got what he deserved. This was a man who'd spent his entire life seeking peace and reconciliation on that bloody and tragic island. And it shocked me deeply to discover that the people who wished and rejoiced in his death were fellow citizens of [Canada] ... Don't think it doesn't put a chill down your spine when you get mysterious little missives like that."

A decade later, with Igantieff leading the Liberal Party, those hatemongers are now reaping what they've sown. And so are the Tamil Tigers themselves, whose last-ditch positions are now set to be overrun by Sri Lanka's military. Ten years after the group killed Neelan Tiruchelvam, an opportunity to implement his vision of peaceful reconciliation may finally be at hand.

ENDS

-Sri Lanka Guardian