The Twisted Tales of two alleged genocides – and Canada’s claimed support for conflict prevention in Sri Lanka.
Posted on July 5th, 2019
by Chandre Dharmawardana.
David McKinnon, Canada’s High Commissioner to Sri Lanka has
stated, on Canada’s National Day that Canada would continue to
support conflict prevention efforts in Sri Lanka, where it has been seen
how hate speech and media can entrench communal divisions”. Meanwhile back
in Canada, successive Canadian governments have failed to understand how this
very hate speech” is being entrenched in Canadian municipal discourse and even
in parliamentary proceedings by militant diaspora groups. They wish to replay
the old ethnic animosities of their homeland in Canada too.
This has been possible because of electorates where minority groups determine
the swing vote”. Canadian politicians usually know little about Sri
Lanka, and prefer to parrot what gets them the votes even when they
find out the facts. Many candidates running for office in Canada believe or
assume that all Sri Lankan immigrants in Canada are Tamil ethnics. They
readily accept that a genocide” of Tamils had occurred, and that
most Sri Lankan immigrants are refugees from that genocide”. This
is surely very convenient for would be refugees.
The now defunct Northern Provincial Council (NPC) of Sri Lanka led by Mr.
Wigneswaran had declared in 2015 that all Sri Lankan governments since
independence in 1948 had practiced genocide” against Sri Lankan Tamils (see:
Island, Feb 2015, http://www.island.lk/index.php?page_cat=article-details&page=article-details&code_title=119757).
Sri Lankan political historians and jurists have largely ignored this,
conveniently treating it as mere political rhetoric of extremists who
even discourage inter-ethnic marriage and strive to create
mono-ethnic communities subservient to them. But the Canadian Tamil Diaspora
has taken up the drum beat of a Tamil genocide” back in Canada.
Canada’s federal inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls
released its final report with a verdict of genocide”, indicting
Canada’s policies since the times of Sir John A MacDonald. Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau accepted the findings of the report, while informally endorsing
the claim of genocide”. The leader of the opposition, Andre Sheer
contends that Genocide” isn’t the right word to describe what was done
to the Indigenous people. But was it right for what happened in Sri Lanka?
Canada is a signatory to the 1948 UN Convention on the Crime of
Genocide. Following the federal inquiry report, the Secretary
General of the Organization of American States wants an international panel to
investigate the claim and activate justice indicting Canada.
According to the University of Wisconsin scholar William Denevan and
collaborators, the population of native people in the early 16th century in
North America may have been as high as 110 million. Of this, an estimated
native population in Canada during Jacques Cartier’s times could have
been as high as 10 million. It dwindled to record lows in the late
19th century, and recovered partially. It now stands at
nearly a million, or about 1.5 million on including Métiis
and Inuits as well. That is, the native population has dropped by a
factor of at least 10 in five centuries, while European
numbers have increased exponentially. The record lows in the
Native population of the late 19th and early 20th century resulted from
deliberate Colonial policies. Sir John A. MacDonald’s policy of starving
First Nations to death to make room for European settlers, willful
denial of health needs, residential schools, negation of treaties
etc., took their toll. It was a time when a Good Injun was a dead
Injun”. More recently, during WWII, refugee Jewish ships were turned way with
no qualms.
However, Canada turned a page with the quiet revolution in Quebec, and with
leaders like Tommy Douglas and Lester Pearson making a difference, and Canada
became a country with a conscience.
And yet, in spite of all these well-known facts, Canadian legislators have been
very cautious since a proclamation of a Genocide” when Canada is at the
receiving end is not in the plan. Casting stones at others is much easier,
especially if there is political capital to be made.
Three Canadian municipalities, namely Toronto, Pickering and Brampton
have rushed to cast stones and declare May 18 as the Sri Lankan
Tamil Genocide commemoration day”. Furthermore, Mr. Vijay Thanigasalam (a
provincial legislator) has tabled the Bill 104: Tamil Genocide
Education Week in Ontario”. Clearly, inter-ethnic battles of their
homeland are being imported to Canada by militant diaspora
groups who work hand in hand with Canadian legislators who know very
little about Sri Lanka.
Demographics indicate a robust growth, rather than a
genocide of Sri Lankan Tamils, a 12% minority. The Tamil population of
734,000 in 1946 (i.e., just before independence) increased to
2.3 million at the 2011 census, after the fall of the Tamil
Tigers” in May 2009. In addition, some 0.9
million Tamils have emigrated, with most coming to Canada. So the Tamil
population has increased by a factor of 4.4., strongly exceeding the 3.5
factor of growth of the Sinhalese (the 72% majority) during the same
period.
The majority of Tamil speakers live in the Sinhalese areas. According
to CIA fact sheets, at most 5% of the population were under
the Tigers. The RCMP and the news media in Canada (e.g., Stewart Bell,
National Post, http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/01/21/documents-courts-seize-assets-from-the-world-tamil-movement/“),
as well as in Sri Lanka (e.g., see Shamindra Ferdinando’s
series entitled War on Terror”, Island) have reported how Canadian Tamil
organizations funded the Tigers who are proscribed as Terrorists in
most countries even today. The columns of the veteran Tamil Journalist J. B. S.
Jayaraj claim that the Tigers killed more Tamils than attributable
to state terror. This view seems to be echoed by the late Sebastian
Rasalingam (e.g., see , http://federalidea.com/focus/archives/201)
a writer who is believed be a rare voice of the depressed”
castes.. Even Mr. Chandrahasan, the son of the iconic Tamil leader
S. J. V. Chelvanayagam seems to have echoed similar views.
S. J. V. Chelvanayagam founded the Ilanaki Tamil Arasu Kadchi
(ITAK) in 1949 claiming a part of Ceylon as the exclusive homeland of the
Tamils.”. The idea of ethnic communities living apart – apartheid – was a
respectable political philosophy in 1949. However, the majority community
has never accepted the concept of an exclusive Tamil homeland. The Moors living
in the Eastern province have strongly opposed the amalgamation of the East and
the North to form an Eelam”. Consequently the ITAK was never
trusted by the majority community or by the Moors. The ITAK in its turn did
little to win such trust, printing Eelam stamps even in the 1950s, while its
chief ideologue of the times, Mr. Navaratnam, wrote a text emphasizing the
irreconcilability of the Sinhalese and the Tamils. The Sinhalese were
themselves concerned with preserving their Identity derived from a
Sinhala-Buddhist heritage, with “politcal monks” behaving with scant
regard to the very teachings of the Buddha. The ITAK gradually morphed
into a full-blown separatist party that pledged military action in 1976
at Vaddukkoddai. As an irony of history, this was an ancient
garrison-fortification town known as “Batakotte”, designated to
protect the country against South Indian invasions. The ITAK, having
roused the militancy of its boys”, and having failed in its
attempts to reach a negotiated settlement with the state, actually found
itself at the mercy of its own extremists. The northern peninsula,
cleansed of Sinhalese and Mulsims by the Tigers, and with Northern Tamils a
mere 5% of the population, was now pitted against the military might of the
state backed by the Sinhalese and the Moors. This launched a set of
armed conflicts supported by by unprecedented types of terrorist action, use of
suicide cadre and child soldiers, now known as the Eelam wars. They
lasted for three decades, mainly because the tigers were supplied with weapons
and funds from the Diaspora living in the West. The Western politicians
pushed for peace negotiations but took no action to control the flow of
such funding of terrorism from within their shores.
Deaths during the Eelam wars struck all Lankan ethnic groups equally
hard. The claim of genocide” focusing only on Tamil deaths of a claimed
40,000 during the last days of the Eelam wars is currently under review
by the UN Human Rights Commission (UNHRC). The Organization of American
States probably wants a similar review against Canada in regard to its
treatment of native people. It should be noted that Canada is a main
sponsor of the indictment against Sri Lanka, now that the USA has left the
UNHRC.
The indictment before the UNHRC is contested by knowledgeable
authorities including Lord Neseby’s British House of Lords
investigation. Their estimates of casualties come to some 7000, of
which 5000 are Tamil-Tiger fighters. Scholarly studies of
wiki-leaks of diplomatic dispatches, studies by the American Physical Society
of satellite images of shelling, the report of the Paranagama commission
etc., indicate similar lower figures of casualties.
However, the municipalities of Toronto, Brampton and Pickering
rushed to judgment to please ethnic pressure groups. The Canadian Parliament
itself sponsored a sham hearing hosted by Mr. Garry Anandasangaree where
the event was announced with short notice. Admissions were
controlled and cut to a short time window to just voice the genocide story.
If a genocide of 40,000 occurred in the last weeks of Eelam IV,
mass graves of 40,000 killed have to be somewhere. But even
the NPC under Mr. Wigneswaran who claimed a Tamil genocide has NOT
succeeded in demonstrating any mass graves. The Mannar mass grave, which was
excavated with great expectations of providing some support to the NCP genocide
claim fell completely flat. Radio-carbon data indicated that the
skeletons were from a massacre during Portuguese times by a Hindu-Tamil
chieftain who exterminated fellow Tamil converts to Catholicism.
Furthermore, if 40,000 were killed by shell fire and bombings, some 160,000
injured are expected as collateral”, but very few injured were
found among the 300,000 held in the war zone when freed in May 2009.
A grave injustice is being committed by the Canadian municipalities
in their rush to judgment about a Tamil genocide”. This contrasts strongly
with the cautious approach of the House of Commons
regarding the alleged genocide of aboriginal peoples. The good
intentions contained in the Canadian High Commissioner’s statement is
unfortunately not being played out in Canada itself.
[The author is a Canadian and Sri -Lankan academic living in Canada and
attached to the Université de Montreal, and may be contacted at chandre.dharma@yahoo.ca]