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Kevin Libin: Will Canada play host to a Tamil government-in-exile?
Kevin Libin August 14, 2010 – 10:00 am
National Post
LINK A young Calgary man believes he has family aboard the MV Sun Sea. He also believes strongly in the cause of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a.k.a. the Tamil Tigers. He is, in a person, the predicament Canada faces if the Tigers, as some suspect, are employing human-smuggling ships as part of broader efforts to use this country as a base to rebuild their organization — the one behind a decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. This country, say some LTTE-watchers, has all the moral support, infrastructure and political accommodation the Tigers need to make Canada their new headquarters.
“I don’t look at the Tigers as an organization that someone made, I look at the Tigers as my fellow people and citizens,” said the man, who asked not to be named, through an interpreter; he believes his father was one of the passengers on the ship that sailed, uninvited, into B.C. waters on Thursday, to deliver to Canadian shores 490 passengers, all suspected to be Tamils. “Everything [the Tamil Tigers] had done was to help us, to help Tamils.”What the Tigers have done is well documented by the 32 countries, including Canada, that have labelled the group a terrorist entity. In pursuing a Tamil homeland, they pioneered suicide bombings before the Palestinians, launching nearly 200 of them; they are believed to have been behind the assassinations of Sri Lanka’s president and former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, as well as any moderate Tamils who they considered disloyal to their cause. At the height of their power they operated a renegade air force, navy, police force, bank and radio and TV stations
In 2009, Sri Lankan forces decisively defeated the fierce rebel group. But the diehard movement has hardly disappeared, says Peter St. John, a professor specializing in intelligence and terrorism at the University of Manitoba. Beaten in Sri Lanka, their members rounded up by the government there, they may use Canada as their base; the MV Sun Sea, which Canadian officials suspect is ferrying at least some LTTE members, could be part of that strategy.
“The [Tigers] aren’t a huge threat at the moment, but they could well be in the future,” says Mr. St. John. “There’s always a small minority who won’t accept the verdict of history, and will be determined to keep fighting the fight from within a peaceful country like Canada.”
In addition to operating a reputedly sophisticated crime ring, including running weapons and drugs, sea piracy and human trafficking, the Tigers have since the beginning relied on the Tamil diaspora to raise the reported US$300 million a year — an estimated $12-million from Canada — that funded their fight with Colombo. Many, like the Calgary man, support the Tigers. But Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has pointed out that the group uses also “extortion and intimidation to raise funds within the Canadian Tamil community.”
Canada, with more Tamils — 200,000 — than any country outside Sri Lanka — is already a key seat of what is something of a rebel government in exile: In May, tens of thousands of Canadian Tamils cast ballots to elect the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam, a 135-member parliament-style organization with more Canadian representatives, 25, than any other nation. The Sri Lankan high commissioner to Ottawa called the election a Tiger strategy “to keep the movement alive.”
“They’ve been talking about forming the Tamil government in exile here and setting up a number of institutions. Among the old support network for the Tamil Tigers here, they’ve resolved that the war isn’t over, or that it can always be resumed. As far as they’re concerned it’s war to the knife,” says John Thompson, executive director of the Mackenzie Institute, a Canadian security think tank. “Here in Canada, you’ve got all these young kids, their whole sole idea of Tamil identity has been defined by the Tigers. They’re being raised as a poisoned generation to perpetuate the conflict.”
A Canadian Border Services Agency report on 76 Sri Lankan men who arrived last fall on another ship notes that more than two dozen passengers were suspected Tiger members. “If the overseas wing’s intention is to regroup what is left of its Sri-Lanka based operation in Canada … these men clearly have the requisite abilities and experience to move that process along.”
Canada has long been considered fertile soil for Tamil radicals. With a large ethnic concentration around Toronto and Vancouver, and the reputed ability to mau mau even moderate Tamils into providing support, front groups have lured several federal politicians to their rallies and events: Paul Martin, when he was Liberal finance minister, along with Liberal MP Maria Minna, attended a pro-Tiger fundraiser in 2000. Even after Ottawa listed the Tigers as a terrorist group in 2006, Liberal MPs John McKay and Borys Wrzesnewskyj attended a Markham, Ont. vigil in 2007 to honour the LTTE’s assassinated political chief. Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis met with Tiger leaders on a visit to Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami, and Liberal MP Gurbax Malhi told a rally of Tiger supporters last year “I am helping you guys, I’m behind you because you’re fighting for the right cause.” He later claimed he “did not realize” the significance of the prominent LTTE flags and featured pro-Tiger speeches.
There is a history of foreign movements successfully building secure bases in Canada to prosecute violence in overseas homelands, says David Harris, former chief of strategic planning for CSIS, now director of the international and terrorist intelligence program at Insignis Strategic Research in Ottawa. There is, for example, frequently more radicalism among Canadian Sikh separatists—with attendant violence including everything from temple brawls to the assassination of journalists and the bombing of Air India Flight 182—than there is in India itself, Mr. Harris says.
The ability of extremists to keep warm here old squabbles from abroad “is another one of Canada’s gifts to the world,” he says. And the government, he believes, is not fully prepared for the kind of underground organizing a sophisticated operation like LTTE is capable of which, he suggests, could well include infiltrating political and judicial institutions.
Overseas, he says, politicians in affected countries affected have occasionally expressed anger at the inability of governments here to tamp out Canadian sponsorship of terror movements abroad. “To the extent that this develops here, from whatever origins, we have to ask ourselves at what point a reasonable foreign entity that’s being targeted by some of our citizens and their affiliates, is entitled, as a matter of self-defense, to regard Canada as some kind of adversary,” he says. “That’s a big issue and it could be a growing one. You cannot wash your hands of these things, if you have … what seem to be shadow armies, formed on our own soil, and launching hostilities against other powers.”
National Post
