Ontario’s Bill on Alleged Genocide of Sri Lankan Tamils
(Courtesy of The Island)
It was interesting to read Lynn Ockersz’ posting in The Island titled “UN Genocide Convention and Social Peace”. What should rise to the top of the minds of most Sri Lankan readers when the word “genocide” is mentioned, is the allegation against the Sri Lankan state.
The columnist states that “As is known, some sections have been flinging the allegation of genocide against the Sri Lankan state in matters arising from its 30-year war against the LTTE, but it is clear that, going by the UN definition, the Lankan state has not committed genocide”.
The claim of a “Genocide of the Tamil people alleged to have been perpetrated by successive governments since 1948”, was proclaimed by the Northern Provincial Council led by Mr. Wigneswaran. Furthermore, the topical news in Canada centers on Mr. Vijai Thanigasalam, an Ontario provincial legislator, who has tabled a bill (known as Bill 104) to initiate a program for “educating children in Ontario schools about how Tamils have been killed by the Sri Lankan government”, in a gross act of genocide. It is alleged that some 147,000 were deliberately killed, simply because they were Tamils, in just the last few months of the 2009 Eelam IV war that put an end to the armed conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan government.
The Bill 104 has led to much concern among Canadian immigrants from Sri Lanka who find that their children may be bullied in the school yards and corridors, by other children of militant Tamil parents who accuse them of “having killed Tamils’ ‘! Fortunately, Covid-19 has created a lull to such issues, but the political process launched by the pro-Eelamist groups in Ontario seems to be marching forward, as all the major provincial political parties, viz., the conservatives, the liberals, and the new democrats, are all thinking more about the Tamil block vote than about facts. The leader of the New Democrats, a Sikh-Canadian, has simply stated that “he understands the Tamil issues as he knows how Sikhs have been targeted by India”, without any further investigation of the facts.
The facts are not complicated. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has already rejected the allegation of a Tamil genocide, when Mr. Al Z Hussein was asked about it on Sept, 19th 2015. Mr. Sumanthiran, the TNA spokesman, also rejected the Genocide claim (see Tamil Net, 19th Sept. 2015). Lord Naseby, who led a comprehensive British House of Lord’s investigation into the Genocide claim concluded that the death toll during the last stages of the 2009 Eelam IV war could not have been more than 7000. Lord Naseby had accessed classified diplomatic dispatches of Colonel Gash who was at the British High Commission in 2009, to confirm his conclusions. Mr. V. Anandasangaree, the leader of the TULF, has stated at the 2008 December annual party convention that the LTTE massacred its own injured cadre in large numbers as the injured were viewed as a liability.
The UN genocide convention requires establishment of deliberate intent to exterminate an ethnic or cultural group, and the execution of such an intent. According to Mr. Sumanthiran, a President’s Counsel, “Genocide is an international crime. That must be proven in a judicial forum, not in a representatives’ one. (Political) representatives can have their views. We take that view very seriously. We said they have a right to make that view open. …The crime of genocide has certain ingredients that must be proved in an established Court.”
Commenting on Al Z Hussein’s rejection of the alleged Tamil genocide, Mr. Sumanthiran states that “the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights very specifically said, (even) with such a report (as the Darusman report) full of horrors” as he himself called it, he says it hasn’t satisfied the test of genocide.
Lynn Ockersz speaks of “social peace”. Indeed, the impact of Bill 104 has been to disrupt the uneasy social peace that existed between immigrants of Sri Lankan ethnic communities in Ontario. The Bill, even before it is passed, has already imported into Canada some aspects of the ethnic strife that affected Sri Lanka for decades. It seems that some children of politically militant Eelamist parents have found it opportune to bully other children of parents of Sri Lankan origin, using the genocide allegation. They have gone to the extent of demanding that the “Sinhala children” also state that their parents immigrated to Canada from Eelam, and not from Sri Lanka! That then seems to be part of the “education” that they are seeking via Bill 104!
The Northern Provincial Council was elected post-haste, before the Commonwealth Meeting in 2013, because the Rajapaksa government naively thought that the leaders from Britain, Canada and Australia would praise its efforts to restore normalcy, carry out demining, build infrastructure and install democracy in the North, in even allowing a Tamil Nationalist party that had collaborated with the LTTE to come to power in the North. It ignored how General de Gaulle dealt with the political supporters of the Vichy regime.
Instead of praise, David Cameron of the UK took it upon itself to be particularly undiplomatic and critical of the government, expressing views that parroted the sentiments of pro-LTTE groups in Britain. This was a time when Cameron himself had suppressed the Chilcot report on war crimes of the UK government in Iraq. The Canadian Leader boycotted the meeting alleging human rights violations by the government, although his government was facing the “Silent No More” movement of the Native Peoples, and charges of engaging in forced rendering of “suspects” to Syria for torture, in collusion with the CIA.
These governments were very happy with the government of JR Jayewardene, even though an attack on innocent civilian Tamils took place on 23rd July 1983, with evidence of the government deliberately “failing to maintain law and order”. Several eyewitness reports stated that the armed forces and police looked on while arson and looting took place, and in some instances even took part in the riots.
The parallels of Sri Lanka’s “Black July ” riots of 1983, are in fact enacted periodically in the United States, against Black citizens who are routinely targeted. The so-called “Jim Crow” laws exist de facto, though not de Jure, even today, in some US communities. In more recent times, these have become more widely known due to the use of mobile-phone cameras and social media. Thus the information on the killing of George Floyd went viral all over the world. The vast majority of inmates in US prisons are Black People. Nevertheless, the US continues to pose as the champion of human rights.
In Canada, the native peoples have a long way to go, before they even get access to clean drinking water, basic health care, education and other amenities that are taken for granted by white Canadian communities. Even in recent times, aboriginal people in some Manitoba towns have been “arrested for loitering” by the police in the dead of winter, and dropped off dozens of miles out of town to perish in the cold, with the slogan “a good injun is a dead injun”.
And yet, a Canadian provincial legislature is being willingly lobbied into taking action against an alleged genocide in Sri Lanka, while Canada’s many “beams in the eye” are being ignored, even though its own missionaries have chanted “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye”.
Interested readers may find more background on the Bill 104 at the website: https://www,dh-web.org/place.names/posts/Background104.html and at .https://tinyurl.com/ybtbzh7j
Chandre Dharmawardene – Canada
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