What To Do, What Really To Do?

The emotional, loud and frantic protests that have been taking place in Ottawa around Parliament Hill to try to bring attention to the unfolding violence between the government of Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers has highlighted an untenable situation that brooks no real intervention. Pleas have gone out from the United Nations, the European Union, Canada and the United States for the government of Sri Lanka to call a cease-fire, to speak to the leadership of the Tamil Tigers.

It won't happen. Not again. Sri Lanka is determined to rid itself once and for all of the 26-year challenge to its sovereignty. A challenge that has resulted in the violent deaths of too many people, at the viciously determined hands of a terrorist group. Likely, had the majority Sinhalese not oppressed and plagued the minority Tamils there would never have been a call for a homeland of their own.

The Tigers, considering themselves the only leaders of Tamils in the country, haven't done the Tamils much good. In their violence and their arrogance they have simply taken moderate Tamil leadership opponents out of the running by murdering them. They are now in the process of holding roughly one hundred thousand Tamils hostage, as human shields while they're being military besieged in their last territorial bastion.

Canada hosts the largest group of expatriate Tamils outside of Sri Lanka, and they are now shouting out their fear and frustration at what is befalling their families back home. Sinhalese Sri Lankans are in the majority, and they are Buddhist. Tamil Sri-Lankans make up 9% of the population in the north and east of the country, and they are Hindu. There is no love lost between them, charity and compassion scarce emotional commodities.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelem are facing imminent defeat, finally cornered by the Sri Lankan army. Not all Tamil Canadians support the Tigers; they left their country of origin to escape the violence and discrimination they suffered there. The concern of many of those now protesting on the streets of Ottawa is not the downfall of the Tamil Tigers. It is the welfare of the trapped civilians.

The Sri Lankan army has agreed to brief halts in the battle to enable some of the trapped Tamil citizens to flee the violence, but the Tamil Tigers refuse to permit their human shields to escape the war zone. Neither the Tamil Tigers nor the government of Sri Lanka appears overly concerned over the welfare of the innocent civilians; the Tigers because their ideology trumps humanity, the government because these are, after all, only Tamils.

The fear-filled outrage and attempted pressure to make more Canadians aware of the plight of Tamil civilians through these very vocal and disruptive demonstrations appear to be offending Canadians' sense of civic order, their pique at a foreign war is impacting at home, along with resentment that their public spaces have been invaded, their transit times impeded by the tactics of the demonstrators.

The government of Canada has responded, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon has spoken for the country in insisting that Sri Lanka halt its offensive to enable civilians to escape...it cannot impress upon the Tigers the same message. But it is pressure, emotional distress writ large that the protesters bring to their demonstration that has the potential to move governments to act, however feebly.

Tamil Canadians are helpless to do very much of a practical nature to aid and assist their Tamil families in Sri Lanka. They are afforded the option as citizens of Canada to avail themselves of the opportunity to freely express their distress, to insist that their new government take steps to impress upon Sri Lanka their humanitarian obligations.

It won't help much in the long run, but it will assuage to a small degree the helpless grief and worry of fellow Canadians.