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The Tamil diaspora @North44Toronto’s Tamils have left a war-torn homeland to live in a country that has labelled the Tamil Tigers as terrorists. This is how Tamil-Canadian youth cope with their dual identities.Vicky Tam│April 13, 2009 Sri Lanka’s civil war could be over soon but it’s not the resolution that Toronto’s Tamil community wanted to hear. The first days of 2009 seemed like the beginning of the end of the long-standing civil conflict in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan government announced it had captured both Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu, major bases of the Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam (LTTE or Tamil Tigers). The government declared that the defeat of the separatist group was soon to follow. In Toronto, the Tamil community responded with a thousands-strong protest to spark the Canadian government to intervene in the violence. They formed a human chain around Union Station, surrounding the transportation hub where thousands of commuters pass through to get in and out of Toronto. In Sri Lanka, thousands of people were trapped in the jungle war zone, unable to escape the violence between the government and the LTTE for the safety zones. The Greater Toronto Area is home to about 200,000 Tamils—one of the largest populations of Tamils outside of Sri Lanka. Much of the immigration began in the 1980s, to escape the civil war. Home, for Tamil-Canadians, is an island off the coast of India that was known as Ceylon when it was under British rule from the late 1700s to 1948. When the country gained independence, the new government was the beginning of a new source of conflict. Tamil people are one of the ethnic minorities in Sri Lanka, where the government is dominated by the Sinhalese population. Velupillai Prabhakaran created the LTTE in 1976 with the goal of establishing an independent state away from the government they alleged discriminated against the Tamil people. The war between the LTTE and the government began in 1983 and has produced thousands of deaths and refugees since. Shiyanthi Thavapalan, a 22-year-old history student at York University, says she has felt uneasy about her cultural identity since she came to Canada. After she left Sri Lanka for Canada at 13, Thavapalan attended meetings at the Scarborough Town Centre shopping mall organized by the Canadian Tamil Youth Development Centre. “I used to go there every Sunday, or whatever it was, to try to figure out this question, ‘How did I fit in?’” says Thavapalan. “At the beginning what I did was try to disassociate myself but now I’m sort of floating in the middle because there’s large population of Tamil students in York University,” says Thavapalan. “Some of them have different mentality because they didn’t live in Sri Lanka as long as I did or some of them have lived in various other countries and have different experiences so it’s really hard to tell how I fit in. I myself don’t know.” While she considers herself more moderate in her views compared to some Tamil-Canadians she knows that didn’t grow up in Sri Lanka, she disagreed when Canadian government listed the LTTE as a terrorist group in 2006. “They represent themselves to us as a liberation group,” she says. “Their perspective is military, I’m not going to argue that. They’re fighting for liberation so I don’t consider them a terrorist group.” She says by classifying the group as terrorists contrasts them with the Sri Lankan government that does the same thing. “The thing about the Tigers is that their tactics are guerrilla tactics. They don’t have a lot of money to waste on random acts of terror. They do retaliate. If the Sri Lankan army does something particularly aggravating, they will go and take revenge,” Thavapalan says. “But for the most part they don’t commit random acts of terror. First of all they don’t have the resources for that. They’re not organized enough to just do (those things) randomly. With every war comes some crime. I don’t condone everything they do but mostly the things that the Sri Lankan government classify as acts of terror are acts of revenge. They’re not the cause, it’s a response.” Janitha Sivaratnam is almost as old as Sri Lanka’s civil war. The 25-year-old Ryerson University student was two when her family left for Canada. She didn’t visit her homeland again until after the ceasefire was signed between the government and the LTTE in 2002. It’s an experience she says she wants to be able to pass on when she has her own children by bringing them back to an independent Tamil state. “As a Tamil-Canadian it will mean happiness and a relief that I could go back home and visit,” says Sivaratnam. “I will have all this childhood stuff that I missed there, I could even get that back. As a Tamil-Canadian, I’m sure I could carry it onto my children their heritage. I’ll be able to teach them. I should be able to take them there and show them where I’m from, my roots.” Sivaratnam took part in a Stop the Genocide in Sri Lanka protest at Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto on Feb. 27. She attended the protest to raise awareness among Canadians she says were largely unaware of the Sri Lankan civil war or had misconceptions about Tamils. “People who are involved in politics they knew it but the general public have no idea,” she says. “Some of the general public were thinking that all Tamils are LTTE and all Tamils are Tigers and all Tamils are rebels—that’s the image they had. After we started this awareness people (started) to know that not all Tamils are LTTE and what LTTE is and why they’re doing this fight against the government.” |
Cities captured by the Sri Lankan army Timeline: Sri Lanka: A history of power struggle
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