The Tragedy of Sri Lanka: Why Does No One Care?

From the Montreal Gazette:

The petite Sri Lankan refugee's voice is gentle, but her words unveil a world of suffering and brutality.

Davidlambert, 37, came to Montreal four years ago from Trincomalee, a port on Sri Lanka's east coast.

Travel guides extol the city's white beaches and deep-water harbour, which has attracted seafarers like Marco Polo since ancient times.

But the images seared into Davidlambert's memory are far less picturesque.

She sees the faces of her two brothers, Anton, 21, and George, 16, abducted 19 years ago by government soldiers.

"We are Catholic and Tamil," she says, carefully threading red ribbon through printed sheets of loose leaf paper.

"They rounded up the boys in each and every house. They brought all the boys to a public place, a playground," she says.

The brothers were never seen alive again. George's murdered body turned up later at a hospital. He had been tortured.

"His hands were tied so tight, they couldn't see the rope," she says. "They don't know how long he was like that.

"I don't know why God was giving suffering to him. He was very young." No trace of Anton was ever found.

Davidlambert's painful memories are ever present this week as Sri Lanka reports it could be days away from crushing a 26-year insurgency by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The war has bitterly divided Sri Lanka's Tamil minority, traditionally based in the country's north and east, from the Sinhalese majority in the rest of the country. The Buddhist Sinhalese make up 75 per cent of the nation of 21 million while mainly Hindu Sri Lankan Tamils represent 4 per cent and Tamils of Indian origin 5 per cent. The Tamils also include Christian and Muslim minorities.

The army has cornered rebel forces and more than 50,000 civilians on a strip of beach barely three times the size of Mount Royal park.

On Thursday, President Mahinda Rajapaksa rejected appeals by Britain and France for a temporary truce after the British and French foreign ministers travelled to the warn-torn country. Sri Lanka denied entry to Sweden's foreign minister.

On Sunday, the Colombo government dismissed the rebels' offer of a unilateral ceasefire as "a joke." More than 6,400 civilians have been killed and 14,000 injured in the last three months, the United Nations reports.

Humanitarian conditions are said to be dire, with overcrowding, malnutrition and limited medical care in government-run refugee camps, according to aid agencies and the UN.

sss Worried sick about loved ones back home, members of Canada's 100,000-strong Sri Lankan Tamil community - the largest outside Sri Lanka - charge the world is sitting on its hands as innocents are slaughtered.

"Day by day, people are dying, my siblings and relatives," Davidlambert says.

"This humanitarian suffering, people are watching like a sad movie. No one is even raising their voice." Last week, Canadian Tamils marched 33,000 strong on Parliament Hill. In Montreal this week, they paraded day and night around the U.S. Consulate on Rene Levesque Blvd. W., beating drums and waving the scarlet flag of the Tamil Tigers.

In Toronto, police cleared protesters from University Ave. Thursday after up to 4,000 demonstrators blocked the downtown artery for four days.

Tamils have thronged in cities around the world, including London, where a Tamil student ended a 24-day hunger strike outside the British Parliament Thursday.

Yet tainted by its loyalty to the Tamil Tigers, listed as a terrorist organization by Canada and 31 other countries, the Tamil diaspora seems to have lost the public relations battle over the civil war that has wracked Sri Lanka since 1983.

"It's as much a media war as an actual war on the ground," says Jennifer Hyndman, an associate professor of geography at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C.

The tragedy, says Hyndman, is that violent excesses on both sides of the conflict have overshadowed the suffering of Sri Lanka's Tamil minority and the legitimate grievances that gave rise to the LTTE in the first place.

"There's blood on both pairs of hands," she says.

Founded in 1972, the LTTE is infamous for having pioneered suicide bombing and the use of women in suicide attacks and for the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

The rebels have a long history of recruiting child soldiers, according to Human Rights Watch, a non-government organization.

The LTTE has corralled civilians into its ever-shrinking territory and fired on those who attempted to leave, according to a February report by the rights watchdog.

But few in Montreal's 10,000-member Tamil community seem prepared to believe reports of abuses by the Tigers.

"They are the only people who are fighting for us," says Sabapathy Sivasubramaniam, 67, a retired math teacher in St. Laurent who came to Canada as a refugee in 1998.

"They are our only saviours." However, according to the International Crisis Group, an independent non-government organization, the LTTE stifled opposition and assassinated Tamil political rivals.

The government has also committed numerous atrocities, Human Rights Watch charges. Sri Lankan troops have repeatedly bombarded hospitals and government-declared "safe zones" crowded with civilians, the organization reports.

Colombo has barred media and independent observers from the war zone. "The government is determined to fight this war in the dark and they have succeeded," says Brad Adams, Human Rights Watch Asia director, in a telephone interview from London.

But Daya Perera, Sri Lanka's High Commissioner to Canada, dismisses the rights organization's charges, noting that the armed forces recently stopped using aerial raids and heavy weaponry against the remaining rebels in the tiny war zone.

Tamils have long coexisted peacefully with the majority Sinhalese, says Perera, who was a well-known criminal lawyer in Sri Lanka. "When I was at the bar, the chief justice was a Tamil. The attorney general was a Tamil. The inspector general of police was a Tamil." "There is no discrimination. There is no bitterness in Sri Lanka. The bitterness is here (in Canada)," he says.

But Rev. Seemampillai Joseph Emmanuel, a Sri Lankan Roman-Catholic priest living in exile in Germany, contends the Tamils turned to violence in 1979 only after 31 years of efforts to achieve equal rights and regional self-government by democratic means.

In an interview at McGill University, where he took part in a panel discussion Monday, Emmanuel pointed to a history of assassinations, pogroms and forced deportations of the Tamil minority, which faces quotas at universities and discrimination in the workplace, he says.

The former vicar-general of the Jaffna diocese and rector of a theological seminary, Emmanuel saw three of his best friends - two politicians and a journalist - assassinated. Ten Tamil priests were killed from 1981 to 2008, he says, including five he trained personally.

Journalists have also been targeted. On Jan. 8, assailants gunned down newspaper editor Lasantha Wickramatunga, an outspoken critic of the war. Last month, The United Nations cultural and education agency (UNESCO) posthumously awarded Wickramatunga the World Press Freedom Prize 2009.

"As a Catholic, as a priest, I cannot support terrorism but I can very well understand that when a people is oppressed by state terror, the response is counter-terror," says Emmanuel.

Extreme polarization and abuses by both sides have led to "a clash of barbarisms," says Hyndman.

"There's been no moderate middle ground," agrees Adams of Human Rights Watch.

Sri Lanka is a heart-rending example of missed opportunities, says Liberal Foreign Affairs critic Bob Rae, who called Canada's failure to join Britain and France in pressing for a truce a disgrace.

Rae was active in peace talks in Sri Lanka during a lull in hostilities from 2002-2005 as founding chairman of the Forum of Federations, a non-profit organization to promote and improve federalism.

"Events moved in a tragic direction," he says. "The LTTE was not prepared to stop being a guerrilla army. The government was not prepared to make constitutional change." As government troops squeeze the rebels' last redoubt, Rae warns that a defeat for the Tigers is no guarantee of an end to Sri Lanka's troubles.

"The idea a military victory will solve the problem is a complete illusion," he says.

Hyndman agrees. "A military victory may defeat the LTTE in a military sense but does not engage the Tamil people. They exceed the boundaries of Sri Lanka," she says.

sss In the Cote St. Luc Rd. depanneur where he works every day from 7:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., Ranjan Kandasamy worries about loved ones back home.

The normally jovial shopkeeper hasn't had news of his 72-year-old mother and 52-year-old sister in Sri Lanka's northern region for more than three months.

"My sister is diabetic and she can't get medicine," he frets.

Kandasamy took a rare day off on April 21 to join 33,000 Tamils who stood under the grey Ottawa drizzle in the biggest demonstration on Parliament Hill in recent years.

In deference to federal politicians, they stowed their Tamil Tigers flags emblazoned with a roaring tiger and crisscrossed machine guns, instead flying black flags of mourning.

Despite the gesture, only NDP leader Jack Layton came out to speak to the crowd, calling on the government to demand a ceasefire.

The marchers were disappointed Prime Minister Stephen Harper was a no-show. "It's like a slap in the face," says Kandasamy, who came to Canada in 1995 from Jaffna.

Now he scans the TV behind the counter for news from Sri Lanka and hopes for the best.

"It's so difficult," he says, wiping away a tear.

"Everyone knows there's a war in our country. Nobody cares." mascot@thegazette.canwest.com

Credit: MARIAN SCOTT; The Gazette