{"id":117944,"date":"2021-09-08T16:22:58","date_gmt":"2021-09-08T23:22:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=117944"},"modified":"2021-09-08T16:22:58","modified_gmt":"2021-09-08T23:22:58","slug":"erasing-the-eelam-victory-part-23-e","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2021\/09\/08\/erasing-the-eelam-victory-part-23-e\/","title":{"rendered":"ERASING THE EELAM VICTORY Part 23 E"},"content":{"rendered":"

KAMALIKA PIERIS<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

The fourth country that supported Eelam was Canada. Sri Lanka was\nhandled at the UNHRC in the 1980s by Canada, said Pathfinder Foundation. Canada\nis part of the Core group which put forward resolutions against Sri Lanka at\nthe UNHRC in Geneva in 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 Throughout the 1980s and\n1990s, tens of thousands of Tamils arrived in Canada and settled in large\nmetropolitan cities like Toronto and Montreal. The Tamil asylum claims lodged\nwith the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board between 1989  and 1998 had an average acceptance rate of 85\npercent, compared to 60-70 percent acceptance rates overall .  The largest number of expatriate Ceylon Tamils\ntherefore are in Canada, totaling 157,000 in 2016. The second largest group is\nin UK, totaling 120,000 in 2007. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Canada has provided asylum to LTTE\nmembers convicted of criminal charges. Canada gave   asylum to Ravi Sanker Thiagarajah who was\nfound guilty by Supreme Court of Sri Lanka of terrorist charges. He\ndisappeared. He is now living safely in Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The plot for\nthe bomb explosion at the Central Bank (1996) had originated in Toronto. Sri\nLankan intelligence officials tell me they traced the explosives used in the\nbomb and found they had come from the Ukrainian shipment purchased two years\nearlier with money wired from British Colombia, Canada, reported Ranjit Soyza.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was\ndecided that an organization should be created in Canada that could provide\nsupport for the notion of Tamil Eelam as well as the Vaddukoddai Resolution.,\nwith its separatist platform. The Eelam Society of Canada (TESOC) was\nregistered as a non-profit organization in 1978. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

TESOC\nfunctioned throughout the late-1970s, and gradually developed a very strong\nrelationship with the Canadian government, reported Amaranth Amarasingham. Stewart Bell in his book Snow Tigers\u201d said that Canadian Government\nhad helped fund Tesco which in turn funneled funds to the LTTE. One of the\ndirectors of TESCO, Devakumar Sabapathy, issued a threat to kill the former\nPresident of Sri Lanka and his brother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

World Tamil\nMovement (WTM) was created in 1986. WTM was the Canadian arm of the LTTE, and\nwas tasked with not only raising money for the LTTE, but also keeping alive the\nsentiment of Tamil separatism among the Tamil in Canada. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WTM employed sophisticated\nmethods of remitting funds from Canada to the LTTE via Singapore and Malaysia\nusing Bank of Nova Scotia and Canadian Trust Bank. WTM had once remitted a sum\nof 3 million dollars via Singapore to the LTTE. WTM had also deposited\napproximately dollars 7,63,000   collected by force from the Tamils in Canada. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stewart Bell stated\nthat the LTTE and its fronts used every conceivable tactic, government grants,\nfront companies, every type of migrant smuggling and drugs. ” Canadian\nSecurity Intelligence Service (CSIS) estimated that $2 million a year, in\ncollections were  funnelled to the  LTTE in Jaffna from Canada. Another CSIS study\nputs the figure at $ 1 million a month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Federation of\nAssociations of Canadian Tamils (FACT) was formed in 1992. It lobbied the\nCanadian government about Tamils in   Sri\nLanka undergoing persecution by Sri Lanka government. FACT was replaced in 2000\nby Canadian Tamil Congress.  CTC focused\nmainly on facilitating the integration of Ceylon Tamils into Canadian society\nbut it also supported the political aspiration of the Tamils in Sri Lanka. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many Tamil organizations \narose in Canada after the end of the war in May 2009 , reported Amaranth  Amarasingham .The National Council of Canadian Tamils (NCCT) was  set up  in 2010 with the expressed purpose of serving\nas an ethnic lobby group in Canada. In 2012 it submitted a memorandum to\nthe UNHRC\u2019s Universal Periodic Review.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The NCCT and\nthe Canadian branch of Tamil Youth Organization (TYO)   organized conferences and meetings to push\nthe idea of the self-determination of Tamils in Sri Lanka. In February 2012,\nthey organized an Eelam Tamil Youth conference in Toronto where they brought\ntogether representatives from 14 Tamil student associations in high schools,\ncolleges and university and they pledged to \u2018continue the struggle for Tamil\nsovereignty.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The meeting\npassed nine resolutions, two  of which\nsaid, we reject the territorial integrity of Sri Lanka state that occupies\nTamil Eelam and we reject the imposition of Sri Lanka identity on Eelam Tamils.\nThis meeting was opposed to presenting the conflict in Sri Lanka as a civil war.\nThey rejected the unitary state of Sri Lanka.  The conflict is between two nations, and can\nonly be resolved through a two-state solution. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2014 the Canadian ambassador in Sri\nLanka demanded the cancellation of the victory parade, on behalf of all those,\nwho had been pursuing war crimes allegations, against the Sri Lankan military.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2014, Canadian High Commissioner in\nColombo, sent a strongly worded statement, saying that five years after the end\nof the conflict, the time has arrived for Sri Lanka to move past wartime\ndiscourse and to start working seriously towards reconciliation. Canada has\nencouraged the Government of Sri Lanka to retire its annual Victory Day Parade,\nwhich perpetuates roles of victors and vanquished within the country, for a day\nof remembrance for all those who suffered as a result of the conflict. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sri Lanka quite rightly rejected this\nas blatant Canadian interference in purely a domestic matter, said Shamindra\nFerdinando . Canada then declared that\nit would not attend the victory parade. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In August\n2021,  Canada announced funding to nine\nSri Lanka  NGOs to the tune of CAD\n300,000 under a programme labeled Canada Fund for Local Initiatives. These nine\nOrganizations includes Centre of Human Rights and Development, Transparency\nInternational Sri Lanka, Verit\u00e9 Research, as well as Colombo Friend in Need\nSociety. ( Continued) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KAMALIKA PIERIS The fourth country that supported Eelam was Canada. Sri Lanka was handled at the UNHRC in the 1980s by Canada, said Pathfinder Foundation. Canada is part of the Core group which put forward resolutions against Sri Lanka at the UNHRC in Geneva in 2021.  Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kamalika-pieris"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}