 Return to LNP
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Tiger tales
Friday, 21 January 2005 - 8:23 PM SL Time
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Earlier this week, we criticized the federal government`s indefensible reluctance to place the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) -- better known as the Tamil Tigers -- on its list of prohibited terrorist groups. As we noted, the group has cast Sri Lanka into a lengthy civil war that has killed 60,000 people, many by suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks. Since much of the Tigers` funding comes from Tamils living in Canada, the move to outlaw the LTTE would be more than mere symbolism: It would save lives.
So when federal Justice Minister Irwin Cotler met with this editorial board on Wednesday, the topic was at the top of our agenda. Our meeting began in promising fashion: Mr. Cotler spoke in high-flown terms about a `principled` approach to fighting terrorism, explaining the importance of `stat[ing] clearly, unequivocally that terrorism constitutes an assault on the security of a democracy and on the fundamental rights of its inhabitants.`
Unfortunately, this commitment to principle seemed to evaporate when the discussion turned to the Tigers.
First, Mr. Cotler tried to carve out an exception to his `principled` strategy for fighting terror -- which he described as `a more contextualized approach.
`There has begun between the parties a peace process in which statements have been made by the Sri Lankan government almost suspending their judgment regarding the whole question of whether the Tamil organizations ... qualify for terrorism purposes,` the Justice Minister explained. For Canada to render any definitive judgment about the Tigers, he concluded, would be wrong.
That is a strange argument for a veteran law professor to make. Any law student knows that a contract is void if a party enters into it under duress. Why should we accord legitimacy to the Tigers merely because their campaign of slaughter has forced the government of Sri Lanka to enter into negotiations'
Mr. Cotler went on to make an even stranger argument: that it may be too early to tell whether the Tigers actually qualify as a terrorist group. `You don`t want to go ahead and engage in any kind of determination of an entity as being a terrorist entity unless you`ve got clear and unequivocal evidence,` he said. But the Tigers` brutal campaign has been going on for more than two decades. Those who have lost family in the group`s pre-dawn raids on Sri Lankan villages, in which Tigers slaughtered innocent women and children, might be intrigued to learn of this evidentiary shortfall.
In trying to explain the government`s reluctance to outlaw the Tigers without explicitly stating the obvious -- that it results from political pressures imposed by Tamil-Canadian constituencies in Canada`s urban ridings -- Mr. Cotler dug himself an even deeper hole. On one hand, he claimed: `I`m not saying that because the preponderance of Sri Lankans in Canada happen to be Tamil, therefore we`re not paying sufficient attention to [Sri Lanka`s] Sinhalese [majority].` But in another breath, he candidly acknowledged: `The Sri Lankans who are living in Canada are ... Tamils, for the most part, I`d say about 80%. And you know, Toronto I think has the largest number of Tamils in the Tamil diaspora than anywhere else outside of Sri Lanka, so we`ve got to be very careful just in terms of our own relationships.`
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