Two weeks ago, 76 Sri Lankan Tamil men arrived in British Columbia on a boat named the Ocean Lady. This is the first in a two-part article that seeks to contextualise their migration in a framework that addresses both the oppressions they left and the ones they have now entered. In this half, I present an overview of the state of post-war Sri Lanka, with special attention paid to the camps for Internally Displaced Persons. The second half will provide an analysis of Canada’s treatment of migrants, with a focus on the laws and processes that comprise Canada’s immigration system, its detention centres, and the media coverage of the story.

I. War and "Peace:" Detention Camps in Sri Lanka

There are currently a quarter of a million Tamil civilians being held in detention camps in Sri Lanka. When the government of Sri Lanka declared victory in its war on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) this May – thus concluding 26 years of intermittent civil war with a particularly bloody six months – it promised that 80% of the then nearly 300,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) would be returned to their homes within the year [1]. However, since then, not only has the government released fewer than 10% of the IDPs (only half of whom have been allowed to return to their homes), but on October 6 the government revealed that it plans to resettle only 100,000 of them by the end of 2009 [2]. This is merely the most recent in a series of broken promises from the government on the futures of the detainees and the detention centres. What this means is that "post-war" Sri Lanka – in which the government has raised its defence budget by 20% after winning the war [3] – can expect to greet 2010 with barbed-wire camps holding populations 170,000-strong. Note that this number includes 80,000 children [4].

The government justified confining the IDPs in the first place by insisting that "we are well aware that some cadres of the LTTE have infiltrated the ranks of the IDPs and, until and unless those cadres are filtered out, we have no option but to keep [the IDPs] within the welfare centres and relief villages" [5]. Thus, what followed the end of the conflict was the enforced confinement of virtually everyone displaced by the war in military-run camps. At its peak, the LTTE had a maximum of 2,500 soldiers – in other words, less than 1% of the population currently being held in the camps. It is revealing that not only has no court authorized the detention of the IDPs, but neither have any charges been filed against them [6]. In other words, the creation of these camps further institutionalises the systemic discrimination that triggered the war in the first place, though in ways much more blatantly violent than the Sinhala-chauvinist policies that had first bought that tension to the fore three decades ago.

With regards to LTTE support it is imperative we keep two things in mind. First, the LTTE’s military segment was reliant on services provided not only by supporters and sympathisers, but by forced labour from Tamil civilians. Second, until its defeat in May, the LTTE functioned for many years as the de facto government in several parts of Sri Lanka. Thus, anyone and everyone who has ever at any point either been forced to dig a road for the Tigers or who has accepted food from them can and apparently is being classified a risk to state security.

Institutionalised racism, however, is the least of the concerns one might have about life in "peacetime" Sri Lanka. NGOs and local workers in the camps have consistently protested the camps’ alarming living conditions, citing severe overcrowding, unreliable medical care, and irregular access to water [7, 8]. About a third of children in the camp under the age of five are moderately or severely malnourished [9]. There have been several outbreaks of contagious diseases, with health officials recording thousands of cases of diarrhea, hepatitis, dysentery, and chickenpox [10]. Worse, the camps have already suffered severe floods and, as the monsoon season persists, more floods have begun to descend on the area, exacerbating the already desperate living conditions [11, 12].

Besides all this, the detainees continue to be subject to undue violence, even with the end of the war. An estimated 12,000 detainees have been transferred, on suspicion of involvement with the LTTE, to separate detention centres and prisons operated by Sri Lankan security forces and affiliated paramilitary groups. Many of these groups have been already implicated in human rights violations. Many of these detainees are being held incommunicado, meaning they have no access to family members, legal counsel or the protections provided under Sri Lankan law. As Amnesty International notes, "Incommunicado detention of suspects in irregular places of detention (i.e. places other than police stations, officially designated detention centres or prisons) has been a persistent practice in Sri Lanka associated with torture, killings and enforced disappearances [13]."

Authorities have not provided the detainees with information about the reasons for their continued detention, the whereabouts of their relatives, or the procedures for their release. Furthermore, though authorities have reportedly finished registering camp residents, they are not making those lists available to people with missing relatives or to organizations, such as the Red Cross, who do tracing. In some cases the authorities seem to have deliberately misled the IDPs, as on September 11, when they told several hundred of them that they were about to be released, only to transfer them to other detention camps for further screening [14, 15].

That we know this much about the camps should not detract from the fact that we in fact know very little. Sri Lanka has long boasted some of the worst statistics globally with respect to press freedom: out of 175 countries, it ranks 162 [16]. Local reporters are routinely subject to anonymous death threats, seizures of their equipment, and arrests on charges of terrorism. Perhaps most infamous was the assassination in January of Lasantha Wickrematunge, editor of the widely-read and often anti-government The Sunday Leader, whose present editors received death threats in October [17]. The government has authorised the closure of several media outlets and the blocking of access to critical websites. In addition to the suppression of local dissent, it has gone out of its way to prevent any kind of independent international monitoring of its war-time or post-war activities. This is important since, as Amnesty explains in its interview of Sri Lankan journalist Sunanda Deshapriya:

The flow of information from the camps now consists mainly of information provided by relatives of those detained, of individual leaks from aid workers to journalists and of anonymous blog entries. In almost all cases, those providing the information remain anonymous to avoid reprisals. As a result, the information finding its way out of the camps is often unreliable. This can only hurt the detained civilians [18].

Further, Human Rights Watch notes:

The government has effectively sealed off the detention camps from outside scrutiny. Human rights organizations, journalists, and other independent observers are not allowed inside, and humanitarian organizations with access have been forced to sign a statement that they will not disclose information about the conditions in the camps without government permission. On several occasions, the government expelled foreign journalists and aid workers who had collected and publicized information about camp conditions, or did not renew their visas [19].

In May, the government detained incommunicado at least four Sri Lankan doctors accused of providing "false information" on civilian deaths to the international community. These doctors had been providing emergency medical care to civilians during the conflict. Physicians for Human Rights reports that "as the conflict zone became increasingly inaccessible to the outside world, the doctors provided first-hand accounts of shelling and civilian casualties and described the condition of their patients" [20]. Their trial is scheduled for November, meaning that by the time their case is heard, they will have been in jail for at least six months. (Under Sri Lankan law, individuals can be held in unacknowledged detention for up to 18 months [21].) May was also when the first independently filmed videos from the Vavuniya camps became public. They had been filmed by a team of reporters from British Channel 4 News, who were then summarily deported [22]. In June, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the lone international humanitarian presence on the war’s last battlefield, was forbidden access to most camps and forced to close four offices in eastern Sri Lanka [23]. In September, the government expelled UNICEF spokesman James Elder from the country [24].

Canadian officials have also been denied entry into Sri Lanka. In June, Liberal MP Bob Rae was deported from Sri Lanka before he even had a chance to leave the airport. The government alleged that Rae had been "involved in pro-LTTE political activities in his home country" [25]. Earlier this month, two Conservative MPs, Patrick Brown and Paul Calandra, were denied visas. The stated purpose for their trip was to visit detainees and assist in reuniting their Tamil constituents with missing family members [26].

This is the situation that frames the flight of the 76 men who arrived in Vancouver in October. Thousands of other people risk similar such life-threatening trips across the world every year. In 2007, the global population of refugees was over 11 million. In addition, there were 740,000 asylum-seekers and nearly 14 million IDPs [27]. In the next part of this essay, I will consider the ways Canada’s immigration system and media construct and control refugees, by focusing on how these 76 men have been treated by the Canadian state.

The recent arrival by boat in Vancouver of 76 Sri Lankan Tamil men has triggered heated debate about Canada’s refugee system. On October 28, the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia held a forum on the topic, entitled “The “Ocean Lady”: A New Challenge of Illegal Migration on Canada’s West Coast?” One of the panellists, Daniel McLeod, who is duty counsel for the migrants, called these men “classic refugees,” because of the persecution they face in Sri Lanka. “It’s young Tamil men in Sri Lanka who are most at risk,” he said. He also observed that though “the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam at their peak had probably 1500 to 2500 soldiers,” there are currently a quarter of a million Tamils awaiting security clearance by the Sri Lankan government in internment camps in the northern parts of the island.

McLeod, who is also an instructor in Refugee Law at UBC, noted that Canada is a signatory to the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, which states that refugees cannot be penalised for entering the country through illegal means. Canada’s acceptance of the Convention was triggered by its refusal in 1939 to admit the St Louis, a boat containing 907 Jewish refugees, who were forced to return to Germany, where a third of them were killed in concentration camps. However, host and fellow-panellist, Benjamin Perrin, Assistant Professor at UBC Law and Faculty Associate at the Liu Institute, said that because the 1951 Convention only addresses the criminalisation of the entry, “it does not preclude countries from exercising detention where the identities of the individuals are uncertain or there are undetermined security risks.”

McLeod cautioned against assuming the men were Tamil Tigers. “It is common for people who have been forced to work as labourers for the Tigers, to be rounded up, arrested by the army, police, or the special task force – which is a police commando force – and simply disappear,” he said. When describing the men, nearly all of whom are currently confined in a Lower Mainland jail, McLeod said, “Some of them are students, some are farmers, some of them are clerks, office workers. They are all very scared.”

In Canada the acceptance rate for refugees is approximately 47%. In comparison, according to Andreas Schloenhardt, Associate Professor from University of Queensland, in Australia, that number is 80%. (However, Australia has a very different immigration system, which involves using whole islands far from the mainland as detention centres, so these numbers may not be analogous.) Yet the 2007 acceptance rate specifically for Sri Lankans in Canada was 97%.

In 1986, local fishermen came to the rescue of 154 Sri Lankans found floating off in lifeboats off the coast of Newfoundland. Those people were not subjected to what McLeod called “the political frenzy that’s occurring today,” suggesting that in the intervening two decades Canada’s policing of its borders has become progressively more exclusionary and reactionary. This fear was solidified on November 2, when Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, after accepting the fewest refugees in 10 years, dramatically cut the 2010 target number of refugees to be accepted by more than half. Opposition MPs assert that “by steeply dropping the targets, refusing to appoint Refugee Board members for 2 years, cutting $4 million in the department and allowing for board appointments not based on merit, Harper’s Conservative government is deliberately creating a crisis in the refugee system. The crisis is then used as an excuse to bring in draconian measures to close the door to the most needy and vulnerable.”

At the lecture, Perrin claimed that the focus on the “human interest story” of the 76 men, while legitimate, shifts attention away from an analysis of the means by which refugees move illegally between countries. He argued that “Canada must take action to discourage illegal migration and disrupt migrant smuggling operations where they do exist.” Further, Canada is a party to the 2004 UN Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air, which, he said, “calls for [migrants] not to be criminalised, but to be treated humanely. But at the same time, it does not give them the right to temporary or permanent residence in Canada simply because they are smuggled.”

When one student then questioned him about the language used to describe the men, specifically the term “illegal migrant” (which was featured in the panel title), because of the way it implicitly criminalises the men, Perrin responded that “the title of the presentation has a question mark at the end of it, which was very deliberate.” Another audience member had a query about how that kind of vocabulary negatively affects media coverage. Perrin responded, “I think it’s important that before there’s been an impartial determination of the legal status of these individuals, that our language reflect that. So I’m not calling them refugees right now because I don’t know if they are.”

Perrin maintained that “there are advantages to cooperating with other countries, not just the source countries, but also other countries along the migrant smuggling chain,” because this would assist Canada in “creating proactive responses to protracted refugee situations.” One reporter asked, “How are we to trust the Sri Lankan government if they say these people are members of a terrorist organisation? [...] How do you trust a government which is treating a minority as harshly as them?” McLeod answered, “I hope we’re not going to trust the Si Lankan government to make that determination for us. There are a number of ways that Canada Border Services Agency can obtain information in normal ways.” These include taking fingerprints to run through international police records and analysing accents to determine where in Sri Lanka the men are from. However, the RCMP has already begun collaborating with the Sri Lankan government to identify the men.

“There are 16 million refugees worldwide as of June 2009. There’s another 26 million internally displaced persons, who don’t count as refugees,” said McLeod. “Hundreds, if not thousands, of irregular migrants are reported dead or missing every year,” said Perrin.

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A previous version of this article first appeared in Canadian Lawyer. This article was last modified on Nov 5.