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.

But there is no story to tell, no one story anyway, not since that day in 1505 when the fidalgo Don Laurenco de Almeida, resplendent in gold braid and epaulettes and hat plumed with all the birds of paradise, landed on our shores and broke us from our history. No one story, with a beginning and an end, no story that picks up from where the past left off — only bits and shards of stories, and those of the people I knew, and that only in passing, my own parents and son, or heard tell of, for there was no staying in a place or in a time to gather a story whole, only an imagined time and place. And no story of the country — or, if of the country, not our story, but theirs, the parangis‘. Except that we all bore the imprint of that history, like a stigma, internalized it even, made it our own, against our will, calling to memory the while to lose it by losing memory itself.

– Sivanandan, A. When Memory Dies. London: Arcadia Books, 1997. 5-6.

i set up spaces that start to suck in so much meaning that i can’t return to them after a while: old emails; and people i used to know; and some books; and, since i’ve come back from sri lanka, certain folders on my computer.
but i looked today, and apparently i’ve written nothing about sri lanka since June 5. that’s a month today — but it’s not like the stories haven’t writhed every day in the back of my mind. it’s not like i don’t go to sleep every night guilty with the thought of all the work i’d intended to do, all the work i’d said do. it’s not like i’ve stopped wanting to do those things.
but somewhere, the hurt is profound enough that i cannot bring myself to touch it just yet. i’m not sure why. i lost next to nothing there, just took on more than maybe even i had prepared myself for.
but it’s counterproductive to wallow in self-pity like this. when it’s death you’re dealing with, even when the deaths are decades old, time is of the essence. so i’m trying to write about sri lanka, and i’m trying to learn to do something productive with grief.

for weeks now, i have been talking about writing, and i have been doing little of it. i know i’ve promised a few people articles i haven’t delivered. i’m hoping that putting up drafts will help trigger some sort of process to get this shit started. it’s not like everything’s not already too late, but it’s also not like everything is not vitally important right now. this is some sort of experiment, making public things that i’m afraid i’d never complete otherwise.

- July 5, 2009.

—
Draft 1.
Written May 30, 2009. I spent the latter half of April in Pottuvil, which is the closest I came to the actual war, which is closer than nearly everyone I met in Kandy and Colombo.

I think this was the morning we were driving out of Pottuvil, or the last afternoon I drove through its main street. This is where you found the highest density of soldiers from the Special Task Forces. They’d be strolling through the street, or standing in clusters under the shade of trees and store canopies, or grouped around the checkpoints. The van, or maybe the three-wheeler, that I was in that day was making its way down the street, either we were leaving for Gampola or I was going to the post office, and we drove by two soldiers walking past us. I remember they were both young, teenagers, their faces still clear. Thin boys in full army regalia: camouflage trousers and jacket, guns and clips slung over their right shoulders, one hand on their straps. I remember the one on the right in particular, the way the sight of him made something in me twist. He looked unlike anything I’d have expected anyone, let alone anyone in the Task Forces, to look. There was nothing untoward about his uniform or his demeanour: two young boys, two young soldiers, walking through a coastal village in eastern Sri Lanka, laughing, the sun hot on all our skins. It was something about his face and the transparency of his smile. He looked like a girl, and he didn’t. Hair cropped close to his scalp, unblemished skin, and soft cheekbones flaring up below his eyes. Nothing effeminate, only something so untouched and so youthful that I stiffened as though stung. Simultaneously, I drew closer, trying to force the sight of him into imperishable memory. The image I have of him now is the sight of him passing my window, the sun’s light so bright in his eyes that they shone blinding and black.

They were boys, the recruits they got into the army. Teenagers, recruited from the impoverished South. The country’s private schools boasted innumerable cadet troupes, but few of those students would ever join the army, however much military discipline and nationalist rhetoric they’d absorb during their training camp sessions. Ultimately, the army was manned by young men who had nowhere else to go, boys who wore their youth so unselfconsciously on their skin that nothing, not even five pounds of accumulated artillery, could counter it. But these were boys, after all, at work in the more peaceful parts of the East. It was the ones in the North, towards Trincomalee and further north still towards Mullaitivu whom I wanted to see, the boys who were killing that I wanted to see.

Apr 5 to Mar 8, 2009.

I did not wear a sari, sunscreen, or sunglasses; see a waterfall; figure out cricket; drive; end the war; overcome my distrust of curries that are white; read a book; cook; talk to anyone in the Special Task Forces, ever; go north; vote; develop a taste or the necessary olfactory desensitivity required for durian; lose a limb; take the train; get married; or die.