Close to midnight on Sunday, May 10, the only pale-skinned people lingering among the crowd of 200 in the middle of College and University are on the job: reporters or police.
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Fifty of the latter stick to the margins, shifting their weight from foot to foot, cracking tired jokes among themselves. With the fedora-and-notepad set still at the Gardiner, occupied by the main contingent of Toronto Tamils, there’s only one of the former.
That would be me. When I tell protesters, yes, I am a journalist, people smile. But it makes me uneasy.
Later, when I talk to David Poopalapillai of the Canadian Tamil Congress, I realize why. “Why is the media only responding now?” he asks me. “Months ago, I was outside in cold that went through to my bones, so cold I could have been buried, but I stayed outside protesting. Can I ask you why now?”
He’s referring to the roving demonstrations held since January to draw attention to the thousands of Tamil civilians killed by Sri Lankan soldiers, tortured by police or raped in internment camps. He’s not being accusatory, but curious. I don’t have an answer. “They say, ‘Protesters should know how to behave themselves,’ but where were the media when we held press conferences?”
People who’d never even heard of Sri Lanka a week ago now hold court on the ways protesters are “hurting the cause,” but at least they’re talking – even if it’s mostly to express their outrage over snarled traffic.
I’m reminded of the last time Sri Lanka made headlines here, and we made it about us. The tsunami of December 26, 2004, was dubbed “the Boxing Day disaster” by a media so self-involved as to ignore that those affected were mostly Hindu, Muslim or Buddhist. In Sri Lanka, it wasn’t Boxing Day, but rather a horrible day surrounded on either side, for many of Sri Lanka’s minorities, by merely awful ones.
When the British granted Sri Lanka independence in 1948, the Sinhalese majority became a political majority and, in 1950, declared theirs the only official language, causing mass unemployment among Tamils. In years following, Sinhalese began spreading out into Tamil districts, changing them to majority Sinhal, affecting representation in government and evoking similarities to – as Poopalapillai tells it – Israeli settlers in Palestine.
Slowly, peaceful activism gave way to militancy. In 1983, 13 soldiers were killed by Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam youth in ensuing riots, thousands of Tamil civilians were killed.
LTTE support skyrocketed. Today, the Tigers stand accused by human rights groups of recruiting child soldiers, relocating whole towns as they retreat into the jungle and firing on civilians who try to flee the war zone. Why, then, do they still enjoy support – albeit mostly among the diaspora?
“When the LTTE controlled the northeast, Tamils were not raped, they were not put in camps,” says Poopalapillai. “It was not a legitimate government, but Tamils felt it was their own.”
Some sections of the Tamil community have a more critical take, particularly those identifying with the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum – a global network that takes a human rights approach and disses the government and the Tigers equally for their abuses.
Namu Ponnambalam, for example, says the Tigers are now exploiting the terrible grief of local Tamils. “The war is escalating. People are being very emotional,” he tells me. “Many people or their friends have lost their lives, and the LTTE have taken advantage.”
The SLDF feels that while the protests are being organized by LTTE supporters, most of those attending the rallies are unaware of this, or at least are not LTTE supporters themselves. And the SLDF believes that the Tigers – who also target other competing Tamil groups – are a threat to the greater project: equal rights for all minorities.
They point out that indigenous Tamils have lived on the island for thousands of years “Indian Tamils” descend from those brought by the British. Most religious Tamils are Hindu, others are Muslim or Buddhist.
“We support the cessation of hostilities in order that citizens can be evacuated out of the war zone,” Ponnambalam says. “But the protesters, in a loud voice, are carrying the flags of the Tigers and supporting the LTTE. There are many other political parties and militant groups. The LTTE must accept that there are other voices in the Tamil community, and that the armed struggle is over for now.”
But do Tamils have reason to believe a political solution could work now when it hasn’t before? “It’s very hard,” he says. “But that’s not a reason to continue the war or support the LTTE.”
Still, he sees the dangers. “Even if the government wanted a political solution, it might want to wipe out the rest of the ‘terrorists,’ as it calls them, first.” Which explains the support enjoyed by the Tigers.
At the protest, I meet a man in his 20s who fled with his family to Canada. He doesn’t want to be named but is happy to talk as we share a dish of string hoppers. He points to U of T across the road. “Can you imagine your brothers, there, pulled out of their house by a mob? Can you imagine these police, here, watching?”
I can’t. “I’m here because of that,” he says. “I can’t go back. Being a man of a certain age is enough to get arrested.”
One of many LTTE flags flutters beside us. I ask whether he’s concerned that some might associate the rallies with a reputed terrorist group. “People don’t just form armed struggles for no reason,” he answers. “They don’t just say, ‘Oh, I’m going to kill myself.'” He says he is a pacifist – and he also understands how conditions drive some to take up arms. He doesn’t support the Tigers.
But he does seem to think there are more important things to worry about right now.
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