"Genocide": The Canada connection

Canada has long had issues with Sri Lanka ever since the 1983 race riots. The country opened its doors with an abundance of goodwill to planeloads of ' refugees' fleeing from the madness. Keen to showcase the nation as a caring one, it opened the doors to others too, claiming to be persecuted in their home countries, like the Sikhs from India when then PM Indira Gandhi was having terrorism problems with armed elements of the community.

Canada has its own separatist problem with the province of Quebec, but it is not an armed struggle. Those newcomers they welcomed some decades ago, however, brought with them their home politics and their ' blood feuds' to settle from Canadian soil.

In 1985, the Sikh extremists (Khalistan Liberation Force) in Canada were responsible for blowing up an Air India plane on its way from Montreal to Delhi via London. All aboard, 329 of them, including 82 children died. Canada was to be accused as a state sponsoring terrorism.

The Sri Lankan Diaspora in Canada did not go that far, but they have remained a pressure group on Canadian political parties. In the late 1980s, the Canadian Government began the practice of refusing to accept ex-military chiefs as Sri Lanka's high commissioners, a practice it maintains to-date. Not that Canada is an anti-war nation. Its Special Forces are on active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan right now.

Last week, the pro-LTTE Diaspora in Canada succeeded in getting a Private Members Bill passage through the provincial assembly of Ontario. Moved by an avowed fan of the LTTE chief, the Bill declares a week in May to be commemorated as 'Tamil Genocide Education Week'. The law which has now got Royal Assent will see the province's Education Ministry "brainwash" the kids that a case of "genocide" occurred in Sri Lanka, not just in 2009 when the LTTE was liquidated on the battlefield, but ever since 1948.

Even if cases can arguably be made about excesses during the armed conflict in Sri Lanka, the most ardent critic of the military campaign to neutralise the LTTE (declared a terrorist organisation by Canada in 2006) has found trouble justifying it as genocide; a loosely bandied word that in its ordinary sense means the systematic and deliberate elimination of an ethnic group.

The Ontario clan ( which is the Toronto- based Diaspora) will, of course, claim one-upmanship with their like-minded colleagues around the world on their success.

The Government will have its work cut out in meeting these challenges whether in Ontario or elsewhere. It will need to be proactive, diplomatically and legally. The mission in Canada has been headless for months on end. Summoning the Canadian envoy in Colombo and expressing concern is just not enough. The Government must retain skilled lawyers specialised in the fields of Constitutional Law, Human Rights and Administrative Law, briefed and ' instructed' ( i. e. pay their fees!) without allowing these issues to snowball like has happened at the UN Human Rights Council. Most of these claims by the Diaspora can be clinically debunked with consummate ease if only the Government can get its act together.

For the Canadians, if they really are interested in the subject of genocide, the current upsurge of violence in Palestine might be a good starting point. But there probably aren't enough Palestinians in Canada to talk of genocide when they were evicted from their homeland - in 1948. In neighbouring USA’s Capitol Hill that debate has started.