The Human Dimension

Canadians have no wish to welcome refugees or immigrants who will not respect officially sanctioned processes whereby this country is able to vet new prospects for landed immigrant status. We have no interest in reluctantly welcoming people whose desperation may be real and may be feigned, but which compels them to strike illegal bargains with the devils who live handsomely over the avails of human smuggling.

This country's official complaints to Thailand, the country that has been used as a transit point for Tamils seeking to escape Sri Lanka and enter Canada, a country where thousands of their compatriots have long since escaped to for the purpose of finding a welcoming berth, has resulted in that country becoming alert to the necessity to halt the traffic. Not by detaining the smugglers who are too crafty and self-preserving, but those who fall prey to their smuggling offers.

Who take thousands of dollars from desperate people, pack them into cargo ships and transport them over a long and dangerously arduous ocean voyage to the shores of Canada. That voyage is a real risk to the lives of those who choose to hazard the vicissitudes of a treacherous ocean voyage. Little realizing what they submit themselves to. And, on arriving in Canada, are sequestered in an incarceration setting until they have been cleared for discharge into the general public.

The result being that hundreds of Tamil Sri Lankans now languish in bare and miserably crowded holding cells before being eventually dispatched in some manner back to Sri Lanka from whence they fled. Men, women and children. Somehow managing to endure the confines of incarceration in dreadfully confined spaces; subsistence endurance. Not quite resembling the more humane circumstances encountered on arrival in Canada.

Sri Lankans well established in Canada have sent descriptions of their lives in this country back to their yearning relatives in Sri Lanka, anxious to escape a country and a government that has violated their human rights. They were helped not one iota in their plight by the viciously brutal Tamil Tigers who fought for a Tamil homeland. And whom a brutal civil-war-like conflict finally vanquished.

The Canadian Tamil Congress deplores the situation and the conditions under which their fellow Tamils live, anxious to have them come to Canada. It urges Canada to resettle those fleeing Sri Lanka. Among whom, indubitably, are former Tamil Tigers, members of a terrorist group. Whom no country will take for fear of their past agitating the present into the future.

One of whom in an interview begged for the mercy of kindness: "Please understand our difficult situation and please create a way for us to live peacefully and freely in whatever country it might be. Except Sri Lanka."