本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛National Post

January 15, 2005

Your editorial (Don't Play With Tigers, Jan. 13) rightly criticizes MP Jim Karygiannis for pandering to the Tamil Tigers and their front organizations. It is puzzling why some Liberals turn a blind eye to a group that is noted for its suicide bombings, forcible recruitment of children as soldiers, arms trafficking and the assassination of Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

When I was a member of the Immigration and Refugee Board, I dealt with hundreds of refugee claims by Sri Lankan Tamils. Most had been victimized by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. The fast-track asylum process allowed innumerable Tigers to obtain Canadian citizenship and to use Canada as a safe base for their operations, including drug trafficking and credit-card fraud.

They also extort money from Canadian Tamils, as they do in Sri Lanka, to support the Tiger cause.

If Mr. Karygiannis believes the Tigers in Canada are representative of the more than 200,000 Canadians of Tamil origin, he is guilty of unforgivable ignorance.

William Bauer, Hensall, Ont.更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net

本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛[转帖]A blind eye to Tamil terrorism

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

本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛[转帖]Grits' failure to outlaw Tamil Tige

Terrorist list: Ex-spy says T.O. MPs fear ban would cost them their seats

Posted by Al Gordon on 2005/03/14

OTTAWA - The federal government's latest argument for keeping the Tamil Tigers off its list of terrorist organizations is a "smokescreen" aimed at protecting political interests, say former officials with Canada's spy agency.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have been widely condemned for their use of child soldiers, assassination and suicide bombings in a long-running civil war against Sri Lanka's Sinhalese government.

At hearings before the Senate anti-terrorism committee over the past few weeks, two Cabinet ministers and the current director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service have said Canada is not flagging the group because it does not want to upset the "fragile" peace process overseas.

But former CSIS spy Michel Juneau-Katsuya calls that logic misleading, saying the Tigers have shown little proof they support a peaceful resolution beyond a recent, tenuous ceasefire.

He adds there is no excuse for being soft on a group that the majority of Western countries, including France, the U.K. and the United States agree is a terrorist entity -- and he questions the real motives behind Canada's tolerance.

"I think, unfortunately, what transpired much more out of this entire exercise is that for certain Liberal MPs, the Tamil community is the greater portion of their constituents, and therefore they don't want to lose their seat," he suggests.

Toronto's Tamil community stands at more than 150,000 people, representing the largest group outside of Sri Lanka and an important voting bloc come election time.

It is also a prime target for Tamil Tigers' fundraising, however, even though the group is banned from collecting money here. Members still manage to pocket about $2-million per year through criminal activities and front organizations.

"We know for a fact that the kind of activities [the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] has been practising right here in Canada is definitely in support of terrorist activities in a multitude of ways," says Mr. Juneau-Katsuya, now a security and intelligence consultant in Ottawa.

He isn't alone in his criticism. The former director of strategic planning for CSIS, David Harris, says the government's policy puts the Canadian public and Tamil community at risk. "You're talking, when you're talking affiliates of terrorist organizations, about people who are associates of violence," he says. "Allowing such people into our country has come at a great cost to many otherwise very moderate, well-meaning ethnic Tamils in this country."

He reacts with disdain to the claim that listing the group might disturb the peace process.

"I welcome that argument only to the extent that it demonstrates the continuing capacity for raucous good humour on the part of Cabinet officers," he says. "It's obscene and an insult."

The Tigers "are the granddaddies of suicide terrorism and anti-civilian terror operations," Mr. Harris adds. "There comes a time when we have to, in our own defence, call a spade a spade on this no matter how many votes may be at stake."

The debate over listing will likely resume today as the Senate committee continues its review of Canada's Anti-terrorism Act with two days of hearings involving security experts.更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net

本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛[转帖]The feds' Tiger tales don't add up

Alastair Gordon Thursday, March 10, 2005


By any objective standard, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is clearly a terrorist organization. The LTTE (or "Tamil Tigers") has killed tens of thousands of Sri Lankans over the last two decades, often in suicide attacks. It has also assassinated a variety of democratically elected political leaders, including Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa and Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. And, to keep its operations going, it has forcibly recruited child soldiers (over 6,000 since 2001, according to Human Rights Watch).

Knowing all this, the United States, United Kingdom and other Western nations have rightly branded the LTTE a terrorist group. Among other things, this means fundraising for the Tigers is illegal in each of those countries. Canada has not followed suit. Why?

In January, the National Post editorial board put the question to Justice Minister Irwin Cotler. In reply, he hinted that politics played a role: "Toronto I think has the largest number of Tamils ... outside of Sri Lanka, so we've got to be very careful just in terms of our own relationships."

S.P. Thamilselvan, the LTTE's political leader, offered a disturbingly similar explanation when he recently told CanWest News from his base in northern Sri Lanka: "Because [Canada] has provided [300,000 Tamils] with dignity and status to stay there as citizens with equal rights, definitely Canada will have second thoughts in making decisions that would affect the sentiments of those people." So we don't want to risk the votes of Canadian Tamils?

But on Feb. 15, Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew offered up a different explanation. Appearing before the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade he alleged that "the government of Sri Lanka themselves have not listed the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist organization ... Most of the people we've been consulting, including the United States State Department ... are demanding that we do not do it at this time."

Unfortunately, the State Department won't back him up. When contacted by my group, the Canadian Coalition for Democracies (CCD), a department spokesperson was puzzled. "The U.S. government designated LTTE as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997," we were told. Applying a similar label, he said, "is a decision for the Canadian government to make alone." Officials at the U.S. embassy in Ottawa were likewise surprised by Mr. Pettigrew's claim.

Sri Lanka's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lakshman Kadirgamar, was even bolder: "No. I can tell you for sure that this government has not asked any foreign government not to designate the LTTE as a terrorist organization ... It is not up to the Sri Lanka Government to prescribe policy for them."

Mr. Kadirgamar went on to note: "It [has been] reported that the LTTE raised approximately $200,000 a month from the Tamil community in Canada." Much of it, he told us, is reportedly extorted through violence and organized crime.

Even knowing all this, our government has been coddling the Tigers for a while now. Five years ago, for instance, then finance minister Paul Martin and international co-operation minister Maria Minna attended a fundraiser for a group identified by the U.S. State Department as a front for the Tamil Tigers. Apparently, Tiger supporters saw this as a gesture of approval for their group. And based on the comments from Messrs. Cotler and Pettigrew, it seems this see-no-evil attitude persists to this day.

The LTTE is a brutal terrorist organization that has caused as much suffering and destruction as Hamas, al-Qaeda and Hezbollah -- all of which have been designated as terrorist groups in Canada, correctly. Our government must explain why an exception is being made for the LTTE. While they equivocate, offering up meagre or unfactual answers, Canadian donors are in fact financing the murders of innocent Sri Lankans.
Misleading Canadians about the crass political concerns that stop us from cracking down on terrorism is bad enough. But failing to do the right thing in the end -- that would be a real scandal.更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net