本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛In Australia, Britain and the United States, belonging to or attempting to raise funds for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) -- better known as the Tamil Tigers -- can lead to arrest or imprisonment. Given the track record of this vicious terrorist group, that makes sense. But while other countries have banned the LTTE outright, Ottawa turns a blind eye. Our government bars known Tigers from entering Canada and freezes the group's assets when officials stumble on them. But more than three years after the passage of the federal Anti-Terrorism Act, the governing Liberals still refuse to place the LTTE on Canada's official list of banned terrorist groups.
Ottawa's failure to act cannot stem from ignorance. Until a recent shaky ceasefire took effect, the Tigers' two-decade long war with the Sri Lankan government had led to 60,000 deaths, many from LTTE terror bombings and ambushes. World leaders in suicide bombings, the Tigers are known for targetting civilians -- particularly women and children. And they press-gang children into doing much of their fiercest fighting: The LTTE's "Leopard Brigade" contains as many as 3,000 seven- to 14-year-olds who were taken from their parents as toddlers and fed a steady diet of anti-government propaganda and nihilism.
To fund all this, the LTTE extorts money from the Tamil diaspora in over 50 countries, including Canada, threatening to torture or kill loved ones back home if Tamil immigrants don't pay up. They are also notorious for drug-running and people-smuggling.
The LTTE is particularly active within the Tamil communities in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Just this week, the National Post revealed that Canadian and U.S. authorities had broken up a major Tiger-run smuggling ring that had sought to sneak Tiger agents and fundraisers into Canada via Bangkok, Mexico City and the United States.
Pierre Pettigrew, Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister, explained Monday that to outlaw the Tigers now would derail a heretofore-unknown Canadian-Norwegian initiative to broker peace between the Tamils and Sri Lanka's majority Sinhalese. But the Liberals' ambivalence toward the Tigers predates any secret Ottawa-Oslo treaty negotiations. In 2000, against the strong objections of the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, then-finance minister Paul Martin, then-international co-operation minister Maria Minna and several other government MPs attended a Toronto fundraising event for the Federation of Associations of Canadian Tamils (FACT) -- an organization identified by the U.S. government as a front for the LTTE. The reason was obvious: Courting the support of a vote-rich ethnic community was more important than worrying about which elements of it the Liberals were rubbing shoulders with.
To his credit, And before he left the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo yesterday, Mr. Martin himself met with three Tamil parliamentarians affiliated with the Tigers, two of whom were denied visas to enter Canada last year.
Until 2002, the Liberals clung to the notion that the Islamic extremists of Hezbollah were not terrorists, either. It took nearly six months of public and parliamentary pressure to convince the government to do what would have come naturally to anyone not trawling for votes in ethnic communities. Given that the Liberals seem even more entrenched in their sentiments toward the Tigers, convincing them to outlaw the LTTE could prove an even tougher battle. But sooner or later, Mr. Martin must surely recognize that a few extra votes don't merit cozying up to the friends of terrorists.
National Post January 18, 2005更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net