call of the conscience

CALL OF THE CONSCIENCE, exhibited photos, films and statements of Sri Lankans who have suffered atrocities in the hands of both the government and LTTE. The exhibition opened in Toronto home to the largest population of diaspora Tamils of Sri Lanka on August 23, in an attempt to highlight the distinction between Tamil nationalism and the LTTE and to criticize both warring factions while focusing on the LTTE’s use of torture, child conscription and suicide bombings.

"I hate the Tamil community here. The way they support the terrorists," said Samaran, a Tamil in his 50s. Portions of his written life story will be an exhibit at the event, and he agreed to speak about it only on the condition that this newspaper not use his real name, photograph his face, or reveal the Canadian city he lives in."Samaran" translates as "survivor," but his fears of reprisal still run high. Calling the Tigers the "world's biggest terrorists" in an interview, he said he was picked up as a suspected dissident in 1990 and held for months in a Tamil Tiger prison. At the time, the rebels were solidifying their hold on northern Sri Lanka, and ridding the area of suspected government collaborators and rival rebel factions. "They beat me till I fainted just for wearing a rosary," recalled Samaran, a Christian from a land that's mostly Hindu. He says a young rebel guard told him that "Here, I am the God - you tell the truth, you get released" - but he could only respond that he had no information to give. Hundreds of those he was jailed with were tortured, he said, and many were killed. Then, in a turn of events that proved less fortunate for other prisoners, he said, he escaped when Sri Lankan military planes bombed the jail.

In 1996, he arrived in Canada, where he said he remains amazed at the level of support the guerrillas enjoy. "I'm living away from the Tamil community," he said. He said he urges his teenaged children not to believe everything they hear about the war from Tamil student groups in Canadian universities. Samaran was persuaded to tell his story by a friend who organized the event, a dissident Tamil journalist who also claims the Tigers' reach extends to Canada. Manoranjan Selliah said Tiger supporters burned down a Tamil library for dissidents in Toronto in 1996, and adds that he moved to Canada after articles he wrote in Sri Lanka criticizing the Tigers led to threats.

Today, "I'm getting attacks on both sides," Mr. Selliah said. He said his decision to organize the exhibit has led to charges he is partisan. "Government supporters say, 'Oh, you are getting money from the LTTE now,' “he said, "and the other side is saying, 'Oh you're getting money from the government.' "

The space for the exhibit at Roy Thomson hall was paid for by donations from individuals and trade unions, he said, adding that he feels particularly "smeared" by rumours that he arranged the event to counter last month's "Black July" rallies. Tamils around the world have just marked the 25th anniversary of pogroms that killed hundreds of their brethren in Sri Lanka.

This weekend's exhibit will include six short films that intend to show the evolution of the bloodletting in Sri Lanka. "I am displaying the whole thing," said Mr. Selliah, 47, who hopes the films will show how Colombo politicians laid a foundation that led to civil war, inspiring the Tamils to rise up before their independence movement became mired in what he calls "self-destruction." The films will explore the use of "cyanide capsules, child soldiers and suicide bombs," he said.

The Tigers' drive toward an independent state has lately lost momentum. Mr. Selliah points out that Sri Lankan military campaigns have reduced Tiger-held Sri Lanka to a rump of 300,000 residents in the northern jungle regions.

Source: Globe and Mail Update, August 22, 2008

SPEECHES MADE AT THE EXHIBITION

I would like to start by congratulating the organizers of this unique and courageous exhibition. As the war in Sri Lanka again escalates to tragic proportions, we need the voices of truth more than ever. The truth can be found in the photographs and documentaries that surround us here this afternoon. It is the truth of endless suffering of the human body and continuous oppression of language, culture and identity. It is the truth of voices silenced by the gun and the resulting fear which has gripped entire communities. It is the truth of hopes and dreams crushed – of the persecution of youth, of women, of human rights and social justice activists. And it is the truth of a deafening silence among ourselves – a silence that represents our challenge to work towards a just political solution to the war, a solution that is inclusive and representative of all communities in Sri Lanka.

It is significant that this exhibition is being launched in Toronto. With the world’s largest Diaspora community from Sri Lanka, it is the responsibility of us all to recognize that we can have a progressive impact on the war. We need to talk about why the Sri Lankan state remains unaccountable today, after more than two decades of war, for an overtly racist agenda of oppression, for the bombing of civilians, for illegal detention and torture. We need to talk about why the LTTE remains unaccountable for an authoritarian regime that silences Tamil voices of dissent, which continues the forcible recruitment of children. And we need to ask ourselves where have we been? What have we been doing right here in Toronto to work for peace and justice in Sri Lanka?

We have all too often viewed the war through clouded, misguided lenses of Western privilege. We have refused to confront the mirror image of Sri Lankan state oppression and LTTE authoritarianism. We have sought easy answers from self-appointed leaders, instead of extending our hand to Tamil communities with the compassion, understanding and solidarity that is so desperately needed. We have not risen to the challenge of speaking the difficult truth, a truth which countless activists have lost their lives for.

The 2002 peace process facilitated by Norway failed because it refused to gain the confidence of the people. Instead of carefully building on the demands of the people, demands for dignity, justice and security, the brokers did the exact opposite. They initiated a top-down, elitist approach to resolving one of the world’s most bitter and deadly conflicts, attempting to reconcile differences between two oppressive leaderships, while ignoring the pleas of the people. Ignoring the voices of women. Ignoring the voices of minority communities. Ignoring the voices of workers and rural villagers. Ignoring the voices of the internally displaced. Ignoring the common concerns of the Tamil, Muslim and Sinhalese peoples. The common demands for a life without fear, an end to systemic racism, and an end to impunity.

During the ceasefire, we were told not to talk about human rights violations. We were told that criticism of the LTTE or the Sri Lankan state would jeopardize the peace process. And so political killings, torture and child recruitment continued and often escalated. When we raised these issues, many said that we were against peace. But what kind of peace was being negotiated? It was a peace agreed upon between a chauvinist oppressive state leadership and the authoritarian command of the LTTE. If ever there was a moment in history when the mirror image of the LTTE and the state was absolutely clear to the peoples of Sri Lanka, this was it.

In my opinion, and that of many other activists, much of the responsibility for these catastrophic events lies squarely at the feet of the West. The smug arrogance of Western nations to tell the peoples of Sri Lanka how to achieve peace was intolerable. Human rights activists murdered, children forcibly recruited, the continuing impunity of government forces – this was how the West negotiated peace? This was the peace which the international NGO community told us to patiently wait for? The peoples of Sri Lanka knew it was a tragic farce. Dissidents knew it was a farce. The common people and the internally displaced knew it was a farce. Yet the Norwegian contingent, other privileged nations of the West, and the mainstream NGO community refused to recognize the painful and dangerous reality. Even when the lifeless body of the victim of yet another political killing was taken to the offices of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission, the leaders of this process refused to relent.

The ceasefire was a crucial time when all of us should have been seeking out the voices of courage and humanity among Tamil, Muslim and Sinhalese communities, particularly among the Diaspora here in Toronto. While some of us did continue to support our sisters and brothers who were speaking out against human rights violations and persecution, many others allowed themselves to be silenced by those in the international community who refused to critique the peace process. Every excuse in the book was used to cover up ongoing human rights violations. We were labeled as troublemakers or we were condemned for promoting supposedly Western values of human rights. Yet, what many forgot is that contemporary struggles against racial oppression have been built on the very notion of human rights. We need not look further than the many nations in the African continent where people rose up and broke the shackles of colonialism by fighting specifically for human rights. We need not look further than the many nations of Latin America that today have achieved democratic representative governments, peoples’ governments, by specifically fighting against torture and political killings during decades of military rule and foreign imperialism. What these experiences have told us, from Chile to Bolivia to South Africa, is that peace can only be achieved if the right to dignity and human security is guaranteed, not only as an end result, but clearly as a means to that end.

While we were told not to speak of political killings and child recruitment during the ceasefire, we are now being told to be silent about bombings of civilians, torture and extrajudicial executions during the war. But the fact is that anyone who tells us to be silent about the oppression and murder of either the Sri Lankan state or the LTTE is someone who has no interest whatsoever in achieving a just peace for all peoples of Sri Lanka. Peace in Sri Lanka cannot be attained through a military solution. Human security cannot be achieved by continued state racism and oppression. And human dignity and empowerment cannot be gained through continuing authoritarianism within our own communities. Indeed, liberation and self-determination have never been achieved through fascism. Instead of consistently continuing to divide ourselves, we need to start building solidarity across the common humanity that can unite us all. It does not help when Western governments label us as “terrorists”. And it does not help when the brand of “traitor” continues to be acceptable within mainstream publications in our own communities.

In closing, we need three crucial action pieces from our municipal, provincial and federal governments in Canada and we need them now. First, we need affordable housing, good jobs, recognition of foreign credentials, and equitable distribution of wealth and social services for new immigrants. It is absolutely unacceptable that people immigrating to Canada face dire poverty and systemic racism at work, at school, and within our governing institutions. It is this very marginalization which makes critical dissent within the Diaspora community next to impossible since Canadian society itself isolates and oppresses those who seek a new life here. Second, we need our politicians and community leaders to seek out those critical progressive voices of dissent within the Diaspora and support their struggles for social justice. This means empowering those voices which are not part of the mainstream, who may not speak English, who are not in positions of power and privilege. Finally, we need our governments to demand an independent human rights monitoring body be set up and supported by the United Nations. This body must be impartial and accountable to the peoples of Sri Lanka, especially those living in the North and East. It must have the power and willingness to report violations by all actors in the war. And most importantly, it must work in coordination and cooperation with the people – civil society groups, women and youth, the marginalized, the isolated, the oppressed.

My friends, we must start taking responsibility for our role in supporting our sisters and brothers in Sri Lanka and right here in Toronto. We must call on our collective conscience to heal the wounds that divide us. We must demand bread and roses, and we must demand peace and justice. I sincerely hope that this gathering here today represents a significant step towards the realization of dignity and humanity for all peoples of Sri Lanka.

Kevin Shimmin

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Even as we welcome you to this important exhibition, I want to begin by remembering those civilians who are at this very moment suffering from a brutal war in Sri Lanka. So many have been displaced and are living in desperate conditions. Many have lost relatives and continue to live in uncertainly about their own lives as the war around them escalates. Many youth and children have been recruited, mostly by force, to be used as cannon fodder in a war that means little to their innocent lives. And over the last year, many ordinary people have been disappeared, tortured, bombed and massacred by both sides of this senseless war. This exhibition is about such ordinary people and their suffering. It is also about ordinary people who did extraordinary work, who rose to the occasion to challenge the madness of war; who believed in the value of dissent, and often paid the supreme price of their lives. My conscience, and we think your conscience, demands that we respond to the call to remember such people. And in mourning and honouring those whom we have lost, we hope that we can change the future for the next generation of young Muslims, Sinhalese and Tamils who are waiting at the edge of war and precarious lives—lives of trouble and sorrow, yes, but also of hope.

I want to talk to you a little bit about my own life, my youth, and how I was influenced by ordinary people in a time of war. As a young person growing up in Kandy, I witnessed first-hand the violence against Tamils in the 1977 riots. I saw how the riots spread, with tensions developing even inside my own school between Sinhalese and Tamil students. I saw how Tamil houses and shops were looted and burned. Our house and property was damaged, but our Sinhalese neighbours protected my entire family. In our history, 1977 was significant, as it was the first major communal riot after 1958 that my family remembered. After 19 years of political demands and challenges by the Tamil community, the ruling regime of Sri Lanka was able to incite such cruel violence, shaking the confidence of ordinary Tamils.

Then came the horrible riots of 1983. Again thousands of people were killed. We heard of even political prisoners who were massacred in prison. While again our Sinhalese friends protected many of us, like other Tamil youth I was very angry. I could not accept the response of the Sri Lankan state, as the police watched on and sometimes even participated in the violence that mercilessly attacked Tamils, while we were dependent on the goodwill of ordinary Sinhalese who helped us and saved our lives. And that is when I, along with so many other Tamil youth from the South, went to the North to work towards what we all believed was the liberation of Tamil people. We went with much hope and a sense of duty to serve our people.

While the first couple of years of political work opened our minds and we learned so much about our community, very soon all that youthful enthusiasm was shut down. First, there was the killing of individuals labelled as “traitors”. And then in 1984, the Anuradhapura massacre of over one hundred Sinhalese pilgrims. And then that horror of April 28th 1986, when a pathological killing machine from within our own community was unleashed against our fellow youth, in the form of the LTTE massacre of the other militant group TELO. This is when our broader community witnessed the brutality of Tamil militancy, as Tamil youth hunted down, murdered, tortured and burned alive other Tamil youth in the streets of Jaffna. The bulk of those massacred here were Tamil youth who had come from other parts of the country to join TELO, while many of the youth from Jaffna were quietly spared. The violence that grew inside our community like a cancer with such incidents, also led to a culture of fear, which effectively silenced ordinary people.

October 1990 is an unforgettable month as the entire population of Northern Muslims were ethnically cleansed out of the North by the LTTE. From Jaffna town to the most remote village, ordinary Muslim people who had lived side by side were forced to leave with nothing, within two days. And the entire Tamil community stood silent in the face of orders from the LTTE. Unlike the Sinhalese neighbours who could protect us during the riots of 1977 and 1983, we could not even attempt to help our Muslim brothers and sisters, and those with a conscience in the Tamil community could only weep in silence.

It is this culture of fear and paralysis that my fellow activists Rajani Thiranagama, Kethesh Loganathan, Selvanithi Thiagarajah and Wimalesvaran resisted. But even more importantly, so many unknown students and ordinary men and women also resisted on behalf of their community and their own sense of justice. The brutal murder of such ordinary people who represent the conscience of our community should also be remembered. Our entire community became trapped in the logic of war and militarization, and there was no goal other than the military goal and the strengthening of the LTTE, where the common man, woman and child simply became an instrument for war. The Tamil community has been made powerless in this way, also, by elements from within our community.

War and militarization has trapped our entire country, and it is ordinary Muslim, Sinhalese and Tamil people that are paying the price. It is the poor youth that are recruited to fight and die in the war, whether it is in the Sri Lankan armed forces or the LTTE. For those of us who have found the comfort and safety of life in Canada, we are given rational explanations for everything. We are told to look rationally at the Anuradhapura massacre, the eviction of the Muslims, the recruitment of children or the disappearances and massacres by the State. And for each community is a rationalized explanation for violence against the other community. But we want to challenge this rationalization of irrationality. We want to ask you to listen to the call of the conscience. Can we with a clear conscience justify the recruitment of another mother’s child, of the murder of another person’s son, of the eviction of another family?

We want to appeal, especially, to the next generation of Tamils in Canada. Think of the opportunities you have and the safety that you live in. Don’t you think the youth of your generation in Sri Lanka deserve an education, a livelihood, and the possibility of peace? In listening to our conscience and remembering the loss of all those beautiful lives that could have been much more, we also have the responsibility to act. We have to stop this war and free our communities from militarization. We have to stop labeling and killing people as “traitors”. We have to struggle for peace and justice. We have to change the country into one in which we can all live together, Muslims, Sinhalese and Tamils. Thank you.

Manoranjan