Thoughts from London

Why Brits are playing footsie with the Tigers
So Canadian security raided the Montreal office of the World Tamil Movement (WTM), considered an LTTE front organisation by more than just the US State Department.

At the time I wrote last Sunday’s column there had been no announcement by Canada that those perceived to be Tiger front organisations were also included in the ban imposed earlier this month on the LTTE or that it would clamp down on them as well. By the time the column appeared the Canadians had conducted their first raid.

But where it was done and the manner in which it was done does leave some doubts as to the seriousness of the action and whether it was nothing more than mere gloss. Firstly Montreal is not the main operational centre of the Tigers in Canada. While Montreal along with Vancouver are important centres of Tiger activity in Canada, Toronto is the hub from what I have heard from Tamil sources.

In fact many Tamils who have no truck with the LTTE and even others dare not step into an area called Scarborough in Toronto which is virtually under Tiger control and where much of the violence and skullduggery take place.

If the average Tamil committed to his new home and a pluralistic way of life avoids Scarborough like the plague, it is for very good reasons.
So why were the Tiger front organisations in Toronto not targeted in the same way as the WTM in Montreal?

Moreover would not a raid on one place instead of coordinated raids on several in key cities immediately set off alarm bells among Tiger activists and fund raisers of possible danger.

Concerted action would surely have prevented those involved from moving out of their offices incriminating evidence such as files, computers, discs etc that could and would have tied these organisations to the LTTE network.

Right now one could think of two reasons. Either this was sloppy work on the part of the Canadian security services or it was just a sop to those who had for years been urging Canada not only to ban the LTTE but to cut off one of the key sources of financial support and supply routes to the Tigers.

At the other end of the world as it were, the Australian Government which has no love for the LTTE or its financial and other suppliers, have been breathing down the necks of LTTE support groups, having already cracked down on some people and places and made it difficult to carry out their clandestine activities.

If Australia and now Canada, under its new Conservative government have not been reluctant to take at least the first steps to throttle the financial supply routes that sustain the LTTE arms build up, why is Britain steadfastly refusing to do the same?

Even before the British banned the LTTE under its Terrorism Act six years ago and certainly since then, the government here has closed its eyes to blatant fund raising by the LTTE in violation of the UK’s own laws and London’s obligations under UN conventions and its commitments to Commonwealth decisions.

Britain’s Home Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Metropolitan Police have even managed to improve on the insensitivities of the proverbial three monkeys.

While they don’t see and hear, they are quick to pass the buck thus blaming others for their inaction and insouciance. One supposes there are historical and contemporary reasons for the British Government’s undignified attempt to camouflage the violation of its own laws by an organisation that it outlawed among others with such grandiloquence by a prime minister with a childish penchant for grandstanding.

The British suffer from colonialitis – from memories of its historical past that has left disturbing and in many ex-colonies still unresolved issues.
It is no secret that in perhaps every multi-ethnic, multi-religious country it occupied, Britain followed a policy of divide and rule, what the historians and Latin scholars call “divide et impera.”

The policy was very simple. It used the ethnic or religious minority to do its dirty work of keeping the majority desirous of greater self-rule or independence at bay by rewarding the minority with jobs that would keep the wheels of the administration and the economy turning.
Basically it set up the minority as a buffer against the majority. When post-independence societies tried to correct the imbalance that the colonial rulers had deliberately created-at times with the pendulum swinging too much to the other extreme – the British felt a certain sympathy for its former colonial servants and grudgingly welcomed them into their midst.

More than 30 years ago I helped Walter Schwarz, a Guardian journalist write a monograph on the Tamils of Sri Lanka for the London-based Minority Rights League. Schwarz collected a heap of statistics, some of which was used, that showed that some 20 years after independence the number of Tamils in some of the key professions, the upper echelons of the administration and university faculties such as science, engineering and medicine, was so much higher than their ratio of population.

It intrigued Walter Schwarz because of the cry of discrimination that was being raised at that time by the Federal Party in particular. He and I used to discuss this for hours on end at the then ‘Press club’ where the Indian High Commission now stands, over several glasses of arrack and passion fruit cordial.

It is also worth mentioning that the leading figures who plotted and almost launched the 1962 military coup d’etat were almost entirely persons from ethnic or religious minorities.

It is important to underline these facts as most foreign journalists who parachute into Colombo and turn instant experts and other so-called commentators forget or ignore them when rolling out their learned thesis.
The British do not like to be reminded of such facts. Now that the Tamils are here, some of them who admittedly belonged to and were active in armed groups, the British have found a cheap source of labour, a community willing to do jobs that Britons would not, and contribute to the British economy.

Equally, many of them have settled in distinct areas forming sizeable vote banks that local politicians such as Minister Gareth Thomas and Labour MPs Barry Gardiner, Andrew Love and others cannot ignore. So they pander to the wishes of the Tamil voters, sometimes making outrageous statements, even if their constituents are violating anti-terrorism laws by blatant fund raising.

In recent times the Foreign Office and the British High Commission in Colombo have had officials who seemed to sympathise with the LTTE.
It is in these two places that policy on Sri Lanka is proposed though later approved and implemented at a higher level.

The LTTE was rewarded when Linda Duffield was appointed High Commissioner to Colombo and Stephen Evans headed the South Asia desk at the Foreign Office. The LTTE was even luckier when Stephen Evans succeeded Duffield as High Commissioner in Colombo.

So for a period of eight years or so British policy on Sri Lanka that prima facie favoured the LTTE, was made on the basis of their reports.
Evans, who has thankfully been replaced now, is strongly believed to have been opposed to the banning of the LTTE when this was being considered under the terrorism law.

Had our politicians and diplomats been wise and alert enough Sri Lanka should have been contacting and cultivating key MPs in the Commons, in prestigious think tanks and important British journalists and London based-foreign media who are able to articulate and influence policy and decision- making.

But lack of confidence, expertise or failure to sense and seize opportunities have left us bereft of friends in key places except a few lords and ladies whose contributions to British political life are as valuable as that of a house painter to art.

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