Another Perspective on Tamils

Whose rights are really being trampled?

Torontonians feel they're being asked to suck up without complaint the complexities of an issue they're expected to accept on faith

CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD

cblatchford@globeandmail.com

May 12, 2009 at 3:29 AM EDT

When, earlier this month, organizers were asking 100,000 Tamils to gather on Toronto streets (this particular rally was later cancelled) to protest, I remember a friend asking with mild bewilderment, "Since when did we have 100,000 Tamils?"

The truth is, no one really knows how many Tamils are in Toronto, or Canada. There was an astonishing piece in the Toronto Star earlier this spring trying - in vain, it should be noted - to make sense of the most recent Statistics Canada numbers (29,435 Tamils in the Greater Toronto Area) and the estimates of other studies (which suggest the number may be in excess of 200,000).

This is what Torontonians are wrestling with, not rage about traffic snarls, not racism, not a failure to understand the complexities of the civil war in Sri Lanka or its attendant loss of life. We live in a country where we don't even know how many of our fellows are Tamils from Sri Lanka, but are simultaneously asked to accept on faith that they are properly and legally here and to extend to them every privilege conferred by Canadian citizenship - and to suck it up without complaint.

That's the real question I suspect gnawing at many folks: Are the Tamils merely exercising their rights or have they somehow breached the covenant, unwritten but understood, they have or ought to have made with their new country?

Many Torontonians have long been puzzled by how without any public discussion they remember, let alone any consensus, their city has become home to so many folks from around the world who periodically hold the rest of the place hostage while they make their voices heard about the very issues or crises that drove them here in the first place.

I know already that some readers will argue that Tamils are Canadian, too, and of course they are, but I have to say this was not terribly in evidence Sunday night on the Gardiner Expressway for the now-notorious occupation.

At one point, standing at the front line where the Toronto Police were but two or three feet from the protesters at their feet - infants, toddlers and women for the most part - I looked out upon the crowd and counted a single Canadian flag and 29 of the large, red flags of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the separatist Tamil organization deemed a terrorist group by dozens of countries, including the United States, Australia, the nations of the European Union and, oh yes, this one, too.

I couldn't begin to count the number of tiny, red paper flags or the Tiger T-shirts I saw, though I did note that one of the chants had the person at the megaphone yelling, "Tamil Tigers!" and the crowd answering, "Freedom Fighters!" This struck me as not very respectful of the Canadian Parliament and the elected representatives who decided, in their wisdom, to put the Tigers on the terror watch list.

The Tigers aren't there because of some dippy mistake, by the by, and they have long had tentacles into the Tamil community here, raising money for the cause fair and square or by extortion and threats.

While the Sri Lankan government has been widely criticized for alleged human-rights abuses and for barring foreign reporters from covering the war (which accounts for the wildly varying claims I heard on the Gardiner, the numbers of recent dead ranging from 3,000 to 5,000, the alleged use by Sri Lankan troops of chemical weapons, hospitals bombed, etc., etc.), the Tigers have plenty of blood on their hands.

They are credited by the Council on Foreign Relations, citing the FBI, for inventing the suicide bomb jacket and using women as suicide bombers, continue to recruit child soldiers, are alleged to have been responsible for assassinating a dozen senior officials, MPs and government ministers and have attacked civilians and civilian targets such as Buddhist shrines and office buildings.

So it's a mess in Sri Lanka and thus a mess here, too. As Alok Mukherjee, the chair of the Toronto Police Services Board, said yesterday, in "this global city of ours ... when near and dear ones of this city's residents are in jeopardy in other parts of the world ... when places they come from are visited by tragedy or crisis, they do not remain silent."

No one expects them to do that. No one is insensitive to the fact that many Tamils living here have friends and relatives in Sri Lanka about whom they are terribly worried and that many others have already lost family to the violence. Some of us may harbour the suspicion that the Pierre Trudeau Liberals sneaked in nation-altering patterns of immigration on the sly, but we recognize the benefits and long ago accepted the fact of it.

The question is, what is the price of the city's celebrated multiculturalism, or diversity, as we are now to call it? As one of my friends put it in a note yesterday, "The Tamils have as much right to be here as my ancestors did when the fucking Queen starved us out of potatoes in the 1860s." But when they say the atrocities are so great and the U.S./Canadian inaction so serious that some sort of profound civil disobedience is required, they lose him: "This in my view ignores the commitment they have to us here, and them as part of us. ... Everyone who wants to be part of the larger Canadian family has some obligation to think of the other family members, too."

Seizing and occupying a public highway under the flag of, and in the name of, a banned terrorist group is straining the collective patience. Using children and women as shields at the pointy edge of the front line feels a little too like the tactics used not only by the Tigers, but also by other of the world's terrorists, including the Taliban in Afghanistan, where young Canadians are dying.

That was a dangerous, volatile situation the protesters caused on the Gardiner the other night. A single misstep, one push, an accidental tug and there could have been a stampede, chaos and even deaths. Only the Toronto Police, the tone set at the top by Chief Bill Blair and carried out magnificently by the officers on the ground, saved the day. A police force resolving problems "not necessarily with force but with intellect," Toronto Councillor Adam Vaughan called it yesterday and right he was. But so far, the cops are the only ones thinking their way through this thing.