Sri Lanka’s Telling Exodus

Toronto Star editorial, August 15, 2010

Canada doesn’t have a Tamil “problem,” whatever critics of our refugee system may say about the arrival here of the cargo freighter MV Sun Sea with some 500 asylum-seekers. We processed 34,000 refugee claims last year; these arrivals won’t overtax the system.

It is Sri Lanka that has a problem. President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s triumphalist government has failed to make the country’s large Tamil minority feel secure after crushing the Tiger insurgency last year. Until he does, people will continue to flee.

That’s a message Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government should drive home, as the United Nations, the United States and India have done. Sri Lanka didn’t win the war on its own. India’s political support for Colombo and its naval blockade weakened the Tigers. So did U.S. and Canadian moves to cut off Tiger funding. Canada is anything but “soft” on terror, nor should we be. Any Tiger leaders on the ship shouldn’t expect asylum. Still, our help presupposed a fair deal for Tamils when the war ended.

Now Tamils are fleeing abroad in desperation. So it was a bit much to hear Sri Lankan High Commissioner Chitranganee Wagiswara urging Ottawa to turn away the Sun Sea, with its women and children, to prevent Tigers from regrouping here. If Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority of 17 million were making the minority 4 million Tamils feel less threatened, fewer would be regrouping anywhere.

Rajapaksa once spoke of giving Tamil regions “substantive provincial autonomy” within a unitary state. He talked of creating a kind of senate to enforce minority rights and of recruiting more Tamils to the bureaucracy and military. But the Tamils are still waiting.

“Most people in Sri Lanka are not particularly interested in a political solution,” says Jehan Perera of the country’s National Peace Council. “To the great majority, the end of the (Tigers) has meant the end of terrorism and the end of what troubled them and the country.”

Indeed, instead of showing magnanimity in victory and delivering reform, the Sri Lankan authorities have chosen to rebuff a UN probe into war crimes on both sides and to focus more on economic rebuilding than on devolution. Reconciliation is a distant prospect.

Rather than amplify Sri Lanka’s self-serving rhetoric about “terrorists” probing Canada’s defences, the Harper government should use the political capital it has built up to press for justice for Tamils. That, more than anything, would put the people smugglers out of business.