“Go back to Colombo… Genocide deniers, you are not welcome in Brampton, you are not welcome in Canada”- Patrick Brown, Mayor of Brampton, Ontario – Canada (May 2025)

Post 9/11 in 2001, a few nations including the UK, Australia and Malaysia, proscribed the LTTE as a terrorist organisation which led to the freezing of accounts, seizing of assets and banning of front-organisations. None of this occurred in Canada; where, like the EU, it was not until 2006 that the LTTE were proscribed, allowing it valuable time and space to organise and fundraise in the service of Prabahakaran’s continued wonton attacks on innocent civilians in Colombo and beyond.

Long before the attacks on the Twin Towers of 9/11/2001, a loosely connected group that would later become known as Al Qaeda, detonated a truck-bomb beneath the North Tower of the very same building in New York City, USA; that was in 1993. The event would catalyse a period of legal reform in the US to counteract transnational and international terrorism, leading to the 1997 designation of the LTTE in the US as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, along with the PKK and FARC; designated as such for global fundraising networks, deliberate targeting of civilians and international arms procurement activities.

Global Terrorism is now a subject of study on its own, popularised by the Al Qaeda brand, launched at the world in 2001; both a peak and a nadir for this particular type of international terrorism. In the post-9/11 period, it soon became apparent to western nations that such organisations were dependent on well-organised and coordinated efforts requiring global patronage, assets and financial accounts, patrons and middlemen, front-organisations.

Brampton is a Canadian city in the Province of Ontario, part of what’s called the Greater Toronto Area; the city has a total population of around 745,000. Its large Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora community made headlines with the unveiling of a Tamil Genocide Memorial on the 10th of May, 2025.

No major multilateral international organisation makes the claim of genocide against Sri Lanka. While the United Nations has documented evidence of human rights violations and war crimes committed by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces, there was no implication of genocide or ethnic cleansing.

There is no record of Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch accusing the Sri Lankan Government of either ethnic cleansing or genocide, despite a decades long discourse that is critical of operations by the Armed Forces.

Reckless Endangerment

Accusations of serious war crimes persist, such as the indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas and no-fire zones, targeting of hospitals and humanitarian facilities, denial of humanitarian assistance, extrajudicial killings and sexual violence, enforced disappearances and torture. Successive governments have rejected external or international investigative and judicial mechanisms, with the exception of the Yahapalanaya Government, which co-sponsored UNHRC Resolution 30/1 of 2015. It proposed the so-called ‘hybrid court’, with the participation of Commonwealth and other foreign judges, lawyers, prosecutors and investigators. This resolution had little support among the majority of the Sri Lankan population and that Government did not have the necessary political capital, leading to the abandoning of yet another ill-conceived and ill-considered instrument of reconciliation.

Successive Sri Lankan administrations have failed to:

= keep to its own commitments to multilateral organisations, whether related to reconciliation, justice or accountability and;

= seriously engage with the accusations in a manner that maintains the credibility of Sri Lanka’s institutions.

Ultimately, the inadequacy of engagement and failure to counter allegations in a substantive manner continue to compromise the image and integrity of Sri Lanka’s armed forces and cast aspersions on Sri Lankan society more broadly.

The LTTE’s use of human shields, of shooting and shelling from civilian areas including no-fire zones, has been documented by Human Rights Watch, the International Red Cross, and even by the UN Panel of Experts Report of 2011 (PoE). The character of guerrilla warfare; the difficulties in distinguishing combatants from civilians, are well understood dynamics of modern warfare involving non-State actors.

According to the PoE Report of 2011, between January and May of 2009, approximately 290,000 civilians fled the conflict zone and crossed over to government-controlled areas; many did so at great personal risk; there is documented evidence of the LTTE firing upon civilians fleeing the war zone. The PoE Report acknowledged the chaos and intensity of fighting: civilians intermingled with LTTE fighters in densely populated areas, noting the LTTE military strategy deliberately endangered the civilian population.

The OISL Report of 2015 and the PoE of 2011 acknowledge the battlefield complexities and dynamics of ‘fog of war’ and uncertainties within targeting decisions, most of which are de-emphasised by the mainstream discourse. There exists a substantive, intellectually honest and good-faith response to allegations and accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity but no Sri Lankan Government has engaged sufficiently with the discourse nor taken seriously the need for such engagement.

One Island, Two Nations?

It is important to note that the 2011 PoE Report, which generated many of the allegations against Sri Lanka’s Armed Forces, was not an official UN investigation and did not meet evidentiary standards of international law. Then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon even emphasised, “This report is not a fact-finding or criminal investigation. It represents a human rights inquiry and presents credible allegations which, if proven, would warrant further investigation”. Thus, the PoE was not a fact-finding body and had no mandate to apply evidentiary standards; essentially a compilation of allegations. There were no basic standards applied for corroboration of statements and allegations, no cross-examination of witnesses and much of the evidence was sealed for 20 years.

Post-war rehabilitation efforts and democratic participation in the immediate post-war period, the resettlement of some 300,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) within 3 years, the development of infrastructure in previously war-torn areas of the country, are all dynamics that are ignored by the mainstream narrative. The restoration of voting rights in the North and East was significant; the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) contesting and winning political power at the Provincial Level was further evidence of the protection and promotion of political rights in a post-war scenario. It is still not too late for a Sri Lankan administration to launch a definitive defense of the integrity of Sri Lanka’s Armed Forces; it ought to consider Godfrey Gunatilleke’s ‘Third Narrative’ which draws from the Eastern Theatre of Eelam War IV to present a more nuanced understanding of operations undertaken by Sri Lanka’s Armed Forces.

The post-war North and East hold many social complexities, exacerbated by poverty and a lack of opportunity for economic advancement, compounded by militarisation of large areas, denial of civic rights such as the right to protest, a climate of intimidation by Police and security forces; a failure by the Government to find a middle ground that allows for a State sanctioned commemoration of fallen LTTE combatants that falls short of glorifying a Terrorist Organization. These complexities are compounded by the failure of successive governments to establish a meaningful framework for a permanent political solution that addresses devolution and self-determination; aided and abetted by the discourse of Tamil Nationalism that insists on an extra-constitutional ‘Federal’ solution.

Patrick

The Blind Eye and the Other Cheek

Canadian Governments, far from acknowledging and appreciating these nuances, seem to enable and promote a narrative that serves to further entrench rigid nationalist ideologies on both sides of the divide. Canada has in effect played into caricatures; that the Sri Lankan State, society, and culture are inherently exclusionary and even racist.

The fact that the Canadian Government boycotted the CHOGM (Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting) conference held in Colombo, in protest at the Government of Sri Lanka, was most disappointing given the Canadian role in extending and intensifying the war in Sri Lanka.

A 2006 Human Rights Watch report brought attention to the “intimidation, extortion and even violence” that Sri Lankan Tamils living in Canada were being subjected to in order to raise funds for LTTE operations in Sri Lanka. The report details the use of unlawful pressure against members of Tamil Communities; “One Toronto business owner said that after he refused to pay more than C$20,000, Tamil Tiger representatives made threats against his wife and children”. Author of the 45 page report, Jo Becker notes that “Many members of the diaspora actively support the Tamil Tigers; but the culture of fear is so strong that even Tamils who don’t, feel they have no choice but to give money.”

The report suggests that the LTTE pressures families for donations of between CN$ 2,500 to CN$ 5,000, “while some businesses have been asked for up to C$ 100,000”. Charity organisations, including the World Tamil Movement, British Tamil Association and the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization, were all part of the network of fundraising. These charities solicit funds for what they claim to be assistance to civilians affected by the war. However, investigations, including by Canadian intelligence agencies, found “that a significant amount of the funds raised were channeled to the LTTE for its military operations. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) concluded in 2000 that at least eight non-profit organisations and five companies were operating in Canada as fronts for the LTTE”; Canadian Authorities did little to stem the flow of funding to the LTTE war effort in Sri Lanka.

The Canadian offices of the World Tamil Movement (WTM) were raided and sealed off by authorities in 2006 and investigations by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) uncovered evidence linking WTM to the LTTE through receipts, donor-lists and pledge forms. According to Canadian court and government documents, the WTM alone was believed to have raised millions of dollars annually, a significant portion of which was allegedly funnelled to the LTTE to purchase weapons and fund military operations. The aforementioned Human Rights Watch report also notes that authorities often failed to intervene effectively when members of Tamil communities complained about threats and intimidation by these front-organisations.

Clean Your Room

Even as an advanced democracy, Canada has its own internal fissures related to autonomy for French-speaking provinces – Quebec Nationalism and even its own Federal/ Provincial tensions; a complicated colonial legacy. Canadian alliances with the United States in theatres of war around the world have caused significant death and destruction; a 40,000 strong Canadian deployment as part of the US war on terror in Afghanistan is notable. It is under-appreciated just how much damage was caused by Canada’s acquiescence to and implicit support for, organisations enabling the LTTE, despite decades worth of evidence for the LTTE’s forced conscription of Tamil youth, recruitment of child soldiers, indoctrination of members (including pregnant mothers) to martyrdom and attacks targeting of Sri Lankan civilians on public transport, worshipping at temples, working at offices.

Successive Canadian Governments have unabashedly propagated narratives of a Tamil Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing by Sri Lanka’s Armed Forces, despite the lack of consensus while disregarding Sri Lanka’s longstanding, albeit insufficient, engagement in international institutions.

Indeed, examples like the Tamil Genocide Monument in Brampton are detrimental to any project of national reconciliation, a discourse that only further alienates the prospects of genuine unity, even emboldening ultranationalist segments of the population in the process. Accusations of genocide and ethnic cleansing alongside the demonisation of the State and by extension the people of Sri Lanka, paints a large swathe of the country as being racist, the Sinhala-Buddhist majority as explicitly nativist, exclusionary and innately supremacist; these are all unhelpful caricatures that do nothing but further divide an already divisive situation.

Canadian Governments have allowed the exploitation of its own democratic spaces for activities that supported, promoted and directly funded operations objectively terroristic in nature and continue to this day to allow for the large-scale veneration of the LTTE and its now-deceased leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran. These front organisations and activists have leveraged Canada’s liberal democratic protections; freedoms of speech, assembly, and association to organise, lobby and fundraise; to shield themselves under the rhetoric of human rights advocacy only to actively participate in perpetuating a conflict that claimed thousands of lives.

Canada, unlike the US or the UK, provided little if any material support to the Sri Lankan government during the roughly 30 years of conflict, while conversely, allowing significant and sustained material support to flow to the LTTE. This was largely to appease a small but highly organised and vocal segment of the Tamil-Canadian diaspora. In doing so, Canada not only failed to prevent the financing and promotion of a brutal terrorist movement but also allowed domestic block-vote politics to distort its foreign policy on a complex and sensitive conflict in a developing nation.

By Kusum Wijetilleke