Scarborough Tamils worried for relatives in Sri Lanka: MP calls for UN aid, international monitors

Canadian Member of Parliament for Scarborough- Agincourt, Jim Karygiannis, on Thursday said Canada should ask at the United Nations for immediate aid and international monitors in the affected areas and be willing to send peacekeepers “should we be asked”, Scarborough Mirror reported.

Canadians can call members of both Sri Lankan diasporas – Sinhalese and Tamil – together and ask, “What do we need to make peace back home?” he said. “These people want to do it.”

The MP, who opposed the Canadian banning of the LTTE and WTM, also said the Conservative government must act to shorten what he considers an unreasonable length of time required for Tamils with relatives in Canada to emigrate here.

Since the Sri Lankan government will not give Tamils a separate state, negotiating a “pluralistic society” for the island nation is the only way to avoid war, said Ratnam Ganesh, who is Tamil but brought Tamil, Sinhalese and Muslim immigrants from Sri Lanka together in 2007 for a group he called Canadians for Peace.

“People should look at the Sri Lankan nation as one,” he said this week, but added the country has been polarized.

“I don’t say it’s easy,” he said, adding, “If they don’t work on it, this problem is going to be there forever.”

The paper further reports that member of Tamil community in Scarborough are worried for their near and dear ones in Sri Lanka as the government forces are stepping their artillery attacks targeting civilian settlements.

Scarborough Mirror reported that a sense of gloom hangs over Scarborough as the government forces have occupied the last military stronghold of Tamil Tigers.

Some members of Toronto’s Tamil community took time off work or even children out of school to join protests against the continuing fighting that has their relatives trapped.

Hundreds protested outside the United States consulate downtown on Thursday. Two days earlier, several were arrested at the Sri Lankan consulate before hundreds more gathered outside.

Addressing the Canadian Tamils, Danton Thuairajah, said, “People are doing things spontaneously. They are very emotional.”

Ajanthan Kanapathipillai said he was with a group of friends at a public fast by Tamils in Markham when “we decided to do something.”

The North York man said he was one of 20 protesters who walked into the St. Clair Avenue offices of the Sri Lankan consulate at 10 a.m. for a sit-in and to “demand answers about why innocent civilians were killed in a safe zone” by that nation’s military.

Police soon arrived and, according to Kanapathipillai, consul general Bandula Jayasekara “came out and said, ‘We want these terrorists removed from this office right now.’”

In an interview Thursday, Jayasekara said the men entered the consulate by force. “They pushed my staff and they pushed the door,” he said, adding protesters photographed and videotaped consulate staff “in a very intimidating and threatening manner.”

Jayasekara said he told police the men were members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or Tiger sympathizers, “because only they would do such things.”

Kanapathipillai said he took the week off work to draw attention to the plight of Tamils. He said the protests over the war in Sri Lanka will continue “until there’s peace in that country and people there are safe.”

Before the town was seized by Sri Lankan troops, an aunt and uncle were in the last Tiger-controlled town, Mullaitivu. Kanapathipillai has tried for days to reach them. “We don’t know if they’re alive or dead,” he said.

The protest was videotaped, he said, to show the offices weren’t entered by force and nothing was damaged. “We needed something to prove that we didn’t do anything wrong.”

Quintus Thuraisingham of Scarborough was among the hundreds who gathered for hours outside the building. For weeks, he said later, he’s had no word from about two dozen relatives – aunts, uncles, cousins – forced into Mullaitivu by government bombing.

“People are feeling bad and crying inside,” said Thuraisingham. “We don’t know how we can help our people.”

While conceding the Tigers made mistakes, Thuraisingham called the rebels “a by-product of Sri Lankan state terrorism.”

A former seminary student who fled to Canada in the 1980s, Thuraisingham said the Canadian government should act now to prevent the “human catastrophe” unfolding among Tamils in the north.