Being There

The con­flict in Sri Lanka is rag­ing. Canada is home to a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of peo­ple from the island off the tip of India. Almost a quar­ter of a mil­lion Tamils live in Canada, 200,000 of them in Toronto. I was in the city this week, for a con­fer­ence. On my way home, I walked into a protest by Tamil Cana­di­ans against the war in Sri Lanka. I have never been to Sri Lanka. I am nei­ther Tamil nor Sin­halese. I do know peo­ple who are; peo­ple I like very much.

The Lib­er­a­tion Tigers of Tamil Elam are a sep­a­ratist rebel group listed by Canada as a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion. Unfor­tu­nately, they are also the focal point for con­cerned Tamils in Canada. As I walked through the crowd, I could feel their boil­ing rage. These were not young hooli­gans, the crowd was made of des­per­ate grand­moth­ers, old men, and chil­dren. In the mid­dle, men on mega­phones led a chill­ing call and response. Tamil Tigers flags were everywhere.

Here is what they called:

“Rec­og­nize Tamil Elam” (The state they desire)

“Our National leader — Prab­hakaran” (Leader of the Tamil Tigers)

“Sin­halese stop using chem­i­cal weapons”

“Sin­halese stop killing inno­cent Tamils”

“Cease fire”

The unity of the call and response was over­whelm­ing.  Their anger and hurt was palpable.

As I walked through the crowd, I was ter­ri­fied. Not for myself, I was going home. I was scared for my friends. Scared for their fam­i­lies in Sri Lanka. Scared for peo­ple who live and belong to Canada, but who’s real and imme­di­ate fears are being ignored.

The world is small. There are no far-away con­flicts any more. I don’t know what the proper response to the con­flict in Sri Lanaka is, but I do know this: there must be an offi­cial response. No Cana­dian, born here but with roots afar, is truly divorced from alle­giances out­side the coun­try. We went to war twice to fight for those alle­giances. Why do we now refuse to acknowl­edge the transna­tional nature of our country?

It is not enough to bury our heads and wish our prob­lems away. It is not enough to pre­tend that the bat­tle isn’t being waged here too. We should remem­ber Air India, and real­ize that a safe and healthy Canada needs to acknowl­edge every­one, white, brown, or oth­er­wise. Refus­ing to lis­ten to the legit­i­mate fears of a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber Cana­di­ans is dam­ag­ing to the unity of our coun­try and the prin­ci­ples of equal­ity and mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism upon which it is built.

The Tamil Tigers is, legally, a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion. They use abhorent tac­tics. The Sri Lankan gov­erne­ment, how­ever, is no model cit­i­zen either. There needs to be dia­logue. Canada could be a leader, the leader we used to be. What hap­pened to Pearson’s Canada?  What hap­pened to the coun­try that beleived in talk­ing towards peace?