One of the many advantages of Canada's multiethnic society is the rich diversity of cultures it brings to this country. But there are drawbacks as well, as several politicians -- including two federal cabinet ministers -- discovered this past weekend when they attended an event in Toronto marking the Tamil New Year.
Finance Minister Paul Martin and International Co-operation Minister Maria Minna insist there was nothing political about the $60-per-plate dinner organized by the Federation of Associations of Canadian Tamils (FACT) and that they were merely there to help celebrate a Tamil national event as they would with countless other cultural groups in Canada.
But FACT is not like most other cultural groups in Canada. Both the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the U.S. State Department consider FACT a front organization and fund-raiser for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a terrorist group currently involved in a bloody civil war in Sri Lanka that has already claimed more than 60,000 lives during 17 years of fighting. So it will not do for its defenders to play the multicultural card.
Nor is it credible to dismiss the accusations as "rumours." Barely two months ago, CSIS published an article by Professor Peter Chalk of Australia's Queensland University describing the LTTE as "one of the most proficient and dangerous guerrilla/terrorist groups in the world," with an "extremely sophisticated" international network to sustain its fight against the Sri Lankan government. That network, according to the CSIS article, includes lobbying foreign politicians for support through sympathetic pressure groups such as FACT and similar groups in the U.S., Britain, France, Norway, Switzerland and Australia.
Those countries are also the LTTE's principal sources of international financial support. As the CSIS article reported, the LTTE often siphons off money given to non-profit cultural bodies, making it "extremely difficult" to prove funds raised for humanitarian purposes are being diverted to support terrorism and other illegal acts.
These facts alone should have given the two ministers -- and the two dozen other federal and provincial politicians who turned up at Saturday's dinner -- pause to reconsider their attendance. But if that wasn't reason enough to skip the event, they should have remembered that Sri Lanka, a fellow member of the Commonwealth, has recently had to impose special "war powers" to try to cope with a resurgence of the LTTE's attempts to carve out a separate Tamil homeland in the north of the island.
These war powers, invoked last week under Sri Lanka's Public Security Act, drastically suspend civil liberties and allow the Colombo government to seize property and vehicles to support its fight against the Tamil Tigers. The resort to such draconian measures, the first in the country's 51 years of independence, was made necessary by the LTTE's successful capture of the strategically-important Elephant Pass connecting the Jaffna peninsula with the rest of the country.
More than 40,000 government troops and 500,000 civilians are now trapped in Jaffna province and are being subjected to renewed attacks from the LTTE. The Sri Lankan authorities have pleaded for outside assistance to defeat the Tigers, but apart from an offer from India to air drop supplies to the beleaguered troops, no international help has been forthcoming. Colombo has nevertheless vowed to fight on anyway and not surrender to terrorists, raising the prospect of widespread destruction and considerable loss of life.
Meanwhile, Canadian politicians, in a blatant search for votes here at home, hide behind the cloak of multiculturalism when challenged for lending their moral support to an association their own security agency has identified as supporting -- whether directly or indirectly -- the very terrorists fighting the democratically elected government of another Commonwealth country.
Shame on them.