Illustration by Dave Donald

Thoughts on the creative value of taking a break

“MY LIFE IN MONTREAL WAS SO GOOD,” said the songwriter Sean Nicholas Savage in a recent interview for Bad Day magazine. “We did so many projects. We made tons of albums and we were making movies and just doing tons of shit all the time.” Savage worked at a call centre a couple of days a week between playing music and, like Grimes and Mac DeMarco and any number of Montrealers now doing good in the world, creating a body of work.

Montreal, or rather Anglo Montreal as seen by outsiders, is a Bum City. And Bum Cities are incredibly important: places where you can go and live cheaply and do your work (like, your “Work”), ideally well enough that you’ll get to schlep it to a bigger, more expensive city if you choose to. From what I gather, Savage now lives in Brooklyn.

In Toronto and, I imagine, New York, devoting yourself to art is a form of idleness, and idleness is not a virtue. This is largely because of the cost of living, but also, Toronto and New York are places where, in theory, you could get a paying job in a creative field—you just have to work really hard to get it, and once you get it you have to work twice as hard not to lose it, because there will always be people who haven’t gotten it yet and are willing to work harder than you. In Toronto and cities like it, indolence is a vice. All the best people are busy.

I was born and raised in Toronto, which is probably why I so admire and mythologize the Bum Life. I’m also tired of hearing people boast about how busy they are, tired of hearing myself boast about how busy I am, tired of being busy. So early this spring, I stopped hustling for freelance work on top of my full-time gig and gave myself a month or two to “do my thing.”

I started a new skin care regimen. I planned outfits and took long walks just to “air” them. I worked eight-hour days, started drinking at 5:30 p.m., read music biographies for kicks and bad short fiction for the hell of it. I relaxed. And I was lonely, very lonely, because my friends all have jobs and freelance gigs on top of their jobs. And I was miserable, so very miserable, because for the first time in years I considered my personal life, and the kind of person I wanted to be, and saw that I was coming up real short.

Mostly, I felt guilty. I had a sense of wastefulness: leisure seemed like a frivolous indulgence, especially in a city where no one else could afford it. Also worthless, because the thing about being at leisure among the busy is that it’s not a good look. Being busy is as much a privilege as being not busy, so I don’t say any of this to complain. Only to praise Bum Cities, those little pockets in which leisure is valued.

Then again, “bum” is a misnomer. And maybe I’ve internalized the hard-work ideology more than my Jimmy Buffett/Kevin Ayers fantasies suggest. Being a bum, in the Montreal-musician-as-seen-by-Torontonian sense, is actually very labour intensive. The success of a Savage or a Grimes abides the 10,000 hours rule: they worked really, really hard on their own stuff, stuff no one valued outside of a like minded community, stuff that the world is now starting to appraise. Meanwhile, 10,000 ad copywriters and magazine hacks and radio producers are chipping away idly at the novels they’d have finished if they weren’t paying for condos or Brockton Village apartments.

These days I am busy again, and feeling all the time like something is wrong: there is something I forgot to do, something I have to do that I don’t know whether I’m capable of, something I have to do that I’m capable of and dreading severely. These are good, familiar feelings compared to the one that marked my not-busy time. There is something wrong with me. There is. But I don’t have time to think about that now.

Alexandra Molotkow has written for the Walrus, the Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, Maisonneuve, and the New York Times Magazine.

Bella and two other dogs were caged and kept in a basement. Bella’s back legs were weak and her paws had grown extra toes. You wouldn’t know Bella was a rescue dog now, carrying a large fallen tree branch with her teeth. Her tail was wagging, not between her legs. And her demeanor was friendly, newly accustomed to the family’s two-and-a-half year old son. Bella’s new owner told me she’d heard the original owner was taking out his anger on the dogs after he and his girlfriend split up. Not unlike the case of Queenie, a Cane Corso in New York. She was found starving to death in her home earlier this year. The abuser was a spiteful ex-husband, whose ex-wife thankfully saved the dog.

Dog abuse can also be caused by good intentions–if good intentions mean locking up 61 dogs in two windowless buildings, left to fight each other and live in their own waste. Their owner, Manitoban Peter Chernecki told news outlets that the dogs were strays he rescued from Gull Lake’s local landfill. He insists they were not malnourished, telling CBC News, “The dogs were all fed, they all had water. The dogs were in good shape. They weren’t starving, nothing like that.”

Even so, this September, he and his partner Judith will be sentencedafter pleading guilty to seven counts of animal under the Animal Care Act and Regulations. The Office of the Chief Veterinary Officer for Manitoba cites the distress-related charges on their Media Bulletin:

• failure to provide adequate medical attention when animals were wounded or ill,
• failure to provide adequate lighting, and
• confinement of animals in a way that impaired their well-being.

The couple will be facing a maximum penalty of six months in jail, a $5,000 fine, and a five year ban on dog ownership.

Even if Chernecki was telling the truth—that the dogs had food and water—every living thing needs more than that to survive. The conditions these animals were forced to live in left their fur matted with feces. When provincial officials rescued the dogs, the buildings were treated like a hazardous materials site. Neighbours would later tell the Toronto Star about a strange odour coming from the dwellings and the black flies surrounding the area.

These creatures are famously known to be our best friends, but they were overwhelming neglected. Over half of the animals were euthanized. The Winnipeg Humane Society saved some and others were sent to a U.S. dog shelter called Dog Town. Officials say the incident was a case of hoarding. Animal hoarding can be a result of OCD, addictions or attachment disorder. Whatever the case, 61 lives were abused and 34 of them didn’t survive it.

I had forgotten the sensory thrill of the swing until Christmas, when I experienced Ann Hamilton’s The Event of a Thread, a large-scale, performance-art installation at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. The building’s 55,000-square-foot drill hall was taken over by 42 wide swings, sheathed in spotlights. The planks hung by an enormous pulley system that also manipulated a billowing white curtain, which divided the room in half — the more people swung on either side of it, the more the curtain danced. Those who weren’t swinging were lying under the white sheet, enjoying the breeze as if it was a day at beach, and not a drizzly December afternoon.

Of course, participatory art that involves the general public is not a new thing; it was popularized in the 1960s by conceptual artists like Yoko Ono, but in many ways feels more relevant in today’s isolating tech-driven society. Last year, Marina Abramović’s MoMA retrospective, The Artist Is Present, brought some museum-goers to tears as they stared into the artist’s eyes (and inspired a Tumblr). Closer to home, Toronto’s Mammalian Diving Reflex has become popular with projects such as “Haircuts by Children” and “Slow Dance with Teacher.”

Sometimes participatory art is political, meant to expose the elitist shortcomings of the museum system. It can be about ritual and process, or engaging audiences who normally aren’t approached to join in these sorts of activities. It can also seem gimmicky. All I know is after spending almost two hours at The Event of a Thread, I felt a reconnection with my kid self, the one who sadly can’t jump off a swing for fear of landing on her face, but is jealous of those who do so seemingly without a worry. I was also struck by how connected everyone here was — without the swingers, there is no art and no spectacle.

This got me thinking about my own approach to art, and so I resolved that this year I will participate more, enjoy the creative process rather than always skipping forward, worrying about the results. I also vow to put down the iPhone and actually have conversations and maybe a few more real-life experiences, even if it does mean a face-plant or two.

Fallout shelter signs in New York City. Images courtesy of David Hayes

While walking along East 29th Street near Madison Avenue last Christmas, I discovered a faded fallout shelter sign mounted on the brick wall above a freight entrance. Few images better illustrate the Cold War era than these three yellow triangles against a black (or sometimes blue) background. At a time when Russia was thought to have aimed nuclear warheads at North America, an American public, especially those living in the natural targets of New York and Washington, D.C., knew these signs identified a building with a public shelter where people could escape from a nuclear attack.

The program was started in 1961, around the time the Berlin Wall was being built. A Fairfax, Virginia-based graphic design firm came up with the three triangles (rejected at first, over copyright concerns, for being too close to the warning symbol for radiation). The signs were manufactured on aluminum using all-weather paint and glass beads (a technique commonly used for traffic signs). They were meant to be clearly seen at 200 feet and were thought to be durable enough to withstand the fires raging once World War III began. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, two years later, the signs had become ubiquitous in America.

Canada wasn’t immune from the fear of nuclear attack in the early ’60s. The federal Emergency Measures Organization published a booklet called “11 Steps to Survival.” People built basement shelters in their homes—although much like contemporary reaction after 9/11, most doubted anyone would attack our modest nation when a much bigger, juicier target lay just to the south. Proof that the federal government of the day took it seriously, though, can be seen in the Diefenbunker outside Ottawa (today a museum). It is the largest of more than 50 other emergency shelters built across the country at that time.

As a lover of cultural iconography I decided that while in New York I’d photograph as many signs as I could. I found one on a lovely 14-storey, Art Deco-styled apartment building on East 40th Street and one on a brick house on East 21st beside a window in which an American flag hung. There was a handsome artefact on the Cabrini Medical Centre on East 20th and one that was curling off the brick wall of a building at West 57th and 10th Ave. They were also affixed to the Madison Square Post Office and the Cooper Post Office. But it turns out I was an amateur compared to Andrew Gonsalves who, a couple of years ago, compiled a list of nearly 140, posted on his blog, Don’t Feed the Animals.

By the time the program was winding down in the late ‘60s, more than a million signs identified public shelters in cities throughout the U.S. The agency responsible for them was dissolved in 1979 and federal officials never set up a formal program to remove them, which explains why so many remain.

The idea that anyone believed even heavily reinforced underground bunkers—let alone the flimsy facilities of public buildings—would protect citizens from a nuclear attack seems truly quixotic. Still, in today’s post-9/11 world, there’s arguably more reason to be paranoid. While the world has lost the Soviet Union it’s gained even more unstable nations possessing nuclear weapons. That’s not to mention the threat of accidents at nuclear power plants or the weather disasters capable of crippling them—or even the lingering contamination from the Chernobyl explosion, which released 400 times more radioactive material than the bombing of Hiroshima. With the threat of Iran becoming a nuclear power and in the aftermath of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi crisis, there’s something oddly comforting about an age when a simple symbol on reflective signs could reassure a nervous population.

Gideon Forman. Photo by Robin Hart Hiltz.

That Gideon Forman is an activist should come as no surprise. The child of New York peace activists, he spent his 1960s childhood handing out leaflets around his Greenwich Village home.

What is surprising is that this wiry man in his 40s has become one of Canada’s best environmental strategists and led a group of doctors into a head-on battle with a powerful chemical lobby—and won.

Forman is executive director of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, a small group of environmentalist doctors. At least it was small. Since he took the job less than five years ago, membership has ballooned from 450 to over 5,000. Why the surge? Quite simply, the group set out on an ambitious and high-profile campaign for public health—not about hospital funding or the number of doctors in Canada, but about preventing the sorts of pollution that harm public health.

“The idea of doctors protecting the environment makes sense to people,” Forman says. “Also there’s been huge interest in the pesticides campaign.”

Forman left New York’s hippie enclave and moved north when he was just eight years old. It was the era of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and socialized health care. Canada sounded good to his peacenik parents, and the family left crowded Manhattan for the cleaner streets of Toronto. As he grew up, he followed his parents’ example and got involved in the peace movement. It was there that Forman’s greatest asset came to light. He’s able to see connections between groups and causes and bring together as allies groups that never collaborated before. With the Canadian Peace Alliance in the early 1990s, that meant reaching out to social justice groups involved in East Timor.

As that decade came to an end, Forman was working with Strategic Communications, a company that specializes in campaign strategy and fundraising for unions, charities, and non-profits. It was progressive work, but Forman craved the chance to focus on one campaign that mattered. After a decade at Strategic Communications, he was finding the work “too diffuse,” he says. “I was working on the Canadian Cancer Society, World Wildlife Fund, and gun control, and a bunch of stuff. I really wanted to specialize […] I really wanted to throw myself into one thing. Increasingly in my late 30s, the environment became my passion.”

He began volunteering with the Toronto Environmental Alliance, working on a city-wide ban on cosmetic pesticides. It was a good fit, and when a job opened up to lead the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment in 2004, he jumped at the chance to head an organization already working on pesticides and other toxic issues.

What he jumped into was a vitriolic battle with doctors and environmentalists on one side and pesticide applicators and chemical companies on another. Public support for a pesticide ban was good, but the campaign needed a little extra push. He came up with a brilliant strategy, and called the Canadian Cancer Society.

Groups like the Canadian Cancer Society traditionally focus on research for cures more than on fighting environmental causes. But as causes of cancer other than smoking became more and more clear, the society became more environmentalist. Forman recognized this and worked to enlist the society’s support. Such a large and reputable group brought significant weight to the fight.

The strategy’s success became evident in London, Ontario, where the city council was set to vote on a pesticide ban. It was going to be a close vote, and the pro-ban camp needed to sway just a few councillors to get it through. Forman met with the local head of the Canadian Cancer Society. Would their members contact their councillors and tell them they wanted the pesticide ban?

“I asked her, could we call their folks and ask them to make this one political act,” he says. She responded that they only had a “small” base of volunteers in the community, perhaps 2,000. Forman’s jaw pretty much hit the floor. A volunteer base of 2,000 in a community is huge for any group. “She said yes. It was going out on a limb for them.”

It worked. The target councillors got more than 300 calls a week.

“That’s huge,” Forman says. “It’s like carpet-bombing for a small community.”

The pesticide ban passed easily. With the help of Forman’s umbrella approach, the Toronto Environmental Alliance, the Canadian Cancer Society, and many other local and national groups have brought about cosmetic pesticide bans in Ontario, P.E.I., New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Quebec. Today the focus is on Edmonton and Calgary, which Forman describes as “the gateway to the West.”

While he’s been wearing the mantle of Captain Pesticide Ban for more than half a decade, he’s not a one-issue wonder. Forman and CAPE are also busy on other issues, particularly climate change and green energy. Bringing the umbrella approach to the table and uniting doctors, nurses, the Canadian Cancer Society, the Canadian Lung Association, and other groups, they’re going to be formidable. But what else could Forman do?

“Climate change may be the defining issue of our generation,” he says. “Not being involved in it would be like not being in the Vietnam War issue in the peace movement of the 1960s.”

[Editor’s note: today we launch “Verbatim,” which will be a regular feature where we provide a transcript of our new podcast series, Listen to This. We’ll put these up on the blog shortly after each podcast goes online.]

In the first installation of our new, relaunched podcast series (Oh! And we’re now on iTunes!) Nick Taylor-Vaisey interviewed Scott Gilmore of Peace Dividend Trust, a development NGO based in Ottawa and New York, with projects currently underway in Afghanistan, East Timor, and Haiti. PDT promotes a buy-local strategy for international development, helping connect international aid agencies with local suppliers in the countries where they work. By directing funds to local businesses, PDT believes they see faster, more stable economic recovery in post-conflict zones, with lower overhead costs for funders and higher incomes for local businesspeople.

Listen now at this.org/podcast, or subscribe on iTunes for new interviews every second Monday.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Tell me about Peace Dividend Trust, where it came from, the first moment of its life.

Scott Gilmore: You know, I think this was a baby that was born twice. The first time I was working in East Timor for the UN and was paying $500 a month to a Timorese fellow who had lost everything in the Indonesian fighting and had lost his company and lost his house, and what he had done is basically put a tin roof on the remains of his house, white-washed the walls and charged me $500 to rent the top two floors, because there was no housing there at the time. And one day I saw him hauling into the yard of the house, the burnt-out wreckage of a bus and I thought nothing of it. The next month, right after I gave him my next rent cheque, he had bought tires for it and he had bought a new engine. The next month and after the next rent cheque he was repainting it and in about three months he had a working bus. After about a year an half, he had a fleet of working busses, and had gone from being virtually homeless and jobless with no money, to becoming one of the most successful businessmen in that neighbourhood, employing the most people in that neighbourhood and becoming the seed of recovery in that particular part of town, and it was all because of my rent cheques. So the light bulb went off one day. The international community had arrived, the aid money was going nowhere, (it had not touched the ground), and yet this man had suddenly become a major employer simply on the backs of my rent cheque, and I thought, “Wow, that’s an interesting phenomenon.”

The second moment came when every night after work, myself and some other people that used to work for the UN, would get together for drinks at a grass hut on the beach and complain about our jobs, and complain about how things like the aid money wasn’t arriving, or that the UN jeeps weren’t getting out into the districts because they were missing license plate holders, (even though there were no licenses to put in them), but UN regulations said you had to have a license plate holder so these jeeps sat on the wharf until somebody brought these in from Italy. And we began saying, “there must be a better way to do things”, and one of us suggested that there are a lot of good ideas out here about how to fix peacekeeping and how to improve aid, we should try doing something about it. And that’s where it began about 10 years ago.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Let’s talk a bit about you, let’s go back. You were in East Timor hanging out with some UN associates, how did you get there, what was your route to that route?

Scott Gilmore: It was sheer luck, I had joined the foreign service and was looking for my first posting and Indonesia was falling apart, and I thought, “that would be an interesting place to be.” The government was collapsing, Suharto, the dictator, had resigned, and so I volunteered for it and was sent out to Jakarta. And because I was a low man in the embassy I was given the crap files and one of them was East Timor, because at that time it was a forgotten conflict, there was nobody on the ground, the UN wasn’t there. The only foreigners anywhere near it were nuns and the Red Cross.

So I would go out every couple of months to silently bear witness, to talk to the nuns very furtively, to find out what the latest atrocity was, (or human rights abuse), to record what was actually happening on the ground and report that back up to Ottawa and our permanent mission in New York. It was very depressing and very upsetting, and a very futile exercise as a junior diplomat.

What happened was that, bizarrely, one day, the new Indonesian president just announced he was going to hold a referendum for independence for the Timorese. And suddenly what became a lost cause became the cause celebre. The UN arrived and the donors arrived and the media arrived, and there was only about two or three of us at the time, Western diplomats: somebody for the US embassy, somebody from the Australian embassy and myself, who actually had been paying any attention, who knew any of the Timorese, who could speak the local language, who knew how to get a hold of the guerrillas. So we had very valuable skills for a short period of time and so it wasn’t long going from that to working for the UN because, frankly, there weren’t very many Timorese experts. And even those who had been very, very active on university campuses in Canada and amongst human rights NGOs, who were very big Timor proponents, had no Timor experience, and so we were rare commodities. That’s how I ended up working with the UN.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So what was your role then, you were the expert in the area?

Scott Gilmore: I had a very strange job. It was a very unique UN mission because it was one of the first times the UN actually ran the country, as opposed to just trying to broker peace or maintain peace. The UN was running everything from the health department to creating the East Timorese defense force and I landed in an office called the National Security Advisory office, where myself and a colleague who I had actually known from grad school, found ourselves sitting across a desk from each other at a very young age, doing things like designing with the defence agency for what East Timor should look like, or with the intelligence agency for what East Timor’s supposed to look like, and actually trying to create these things on behalf of the Timorese.

Pretty preposterous actually, given the fact that as a Canadian diplomat, you are by definition a generalist and what I knew about creating a department of defence or intelligence agency can fit an 8-by-10 piece of paper.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So then at that point, you started talking to your colleagues and looking at some problems that existed within this project to rebuild Timor —

Scott Gilmore: That’s right. What happened was there were a lot of us in these preposterous positions, people that were in charge of human rights, people that were in charge of procurement, logistics, police, who were all facing the same challenges. We had a very small amount of time to take a war-torn country and put it on its feet. And whether that meant trying to set up food distribution networks, or a police system, or an intelligence agency, we were all facing very similar problems, which were things like: being able to get paperwork to move through the UN, being able to hire the right people in a quick time, being able to move around the country.

These were nuts and bolts problems–logistical problems. We spend so much time in Western universities and elsewhere debating these grand problems like, what is universal human rights? You know, what are the normative features of democratic reform? How does gender empowerment affect the bureaucratic structure of a third world country? But once you get on the ground, none of that really matters. What matters is, how do you get power into your office? How do you find some local staff? How do you train them? How do you get pens? How do you get from the national capital or the provincial capital if there’s no vehicles?

Nobody pays any attention to these really important nuts and bolts things and Peace Dividend Trust was created to try and pay some attention to some of these things and fix some of these things.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So how long has Peace Dividend Trust been around?

Scott Gilmore: We’re young. The idea started around 1999 or 2000. I quit my day job in 2004, so PDT’s been around for about five or six years. We’ve operated in about 12 different countries so far. We currently have permanent offices in Afghanistan, Haiti, Timor, and we’ve got a project office in the Solomon Islands. And of course, our headquarters is in New York. And in 2010 we will likely be opening an office in Africa.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: What kind of work do you do in these countries? You saw problems when you were in Timor, and you weren’t the only one, so how do you fix these problems?

Scott Gilmore: If you take a lot of the type of work we do, it seems very diverse on the surface. Everything from trying to improve procurement systems, to economic research, to creating wikis for the United Nations. What the common strand is, is that we find and test and implement new ideas for making peace and humanitarian operations work better. So we only do projects that are new projects, in the sense that they’re new ideas.

To give an example, we will never go out and do a microfinance project or build wells in Africa; however, if somebody comes to us and they say, “We have a new idea for building a better well,” or “We think that there’s a better way to manage and target microfinance projects”, then we’ll do that. So we only test new ideas, which is why some people refer to us as a do-tank.

We’ll only do projects that focus on the nuts and bolts; the management, the operations of aid and peacekeeping. We feel this is really the neglected sweet-spot for trying to improve the impact of places like Afghanistan and Haiti. So what do we do? In Afghanistan, we found that the vast majority of the aid money wasn’t actually entering the local economy. Stuff was being bought overseas and flown in, and that was billions and billions of dollars of missed opportunity.

So we put a team of people on the ground whose job it is, is to make it as easy as possible for the laziest procurement officer to buy local, to find an Afghan entrepreneur to provide him with the wheat or water or tires as opposed to finding it in Dubai or Italy. And so far it’s redirected over $370 million of new spending in the Afghan economy. It’s created thousands of jobs, and because of its success, the U.S. government, the British government, NATO and the UN have all changed their procurement policies globally, recognizing one of the fastest and healthiest ways for them to help local economies is to buy local.

In New York, we have a team of people that have been working on this problem that the UN has done 50 peacekeeping missions and they’ve actually never figured out how to do it, they’ve never mapped it out, they’ve never put together a procedural manual on how to launch a peacekeeping mission. So we did that for them. We sat and put our people in their offices in New York and we figured out, okay, what’s a peacekeeping mission supposed to look like? What are you supposed to do in the first ten days? When do you set up your fuel depot? When do you fly in your secretaries? What type of forms are your secretaries supposed to use? And it’s now a pocket-sized baby blue manual called the Mission Start-up Field Guide, which is what every UN manager uses around the world.

So we do very diverse things, but they’re all focused on the nuts and bolts and they’re all new ideas.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Now, it seems like your friends in the West probably love what you do because essentially you make their lives easier, I mean you create a pocket-sized handbook about how to start a peacekeeping mission, but I’m wondering, as helpful as you are to those people on that side, do you find that you are still a foreign voice, you’re still foreign people in foreign lands. What about the local people in Afghanistan and East Timor? How do they react to your presence?

Scott Gilmore: Frankly, they’re more positive, and supportive, and helpful than internationals are. The nationals recognize, whether they’re Afghans or Timorese or Solomon Islanders, that there’s an incredible amount of money being spent on these missions and there’s a lot of foreigners that are being flown in, but that the change on the ground is not as dramatic as everyone expected. You know, they’re not seeing the jobs being created, they’re not seeing roads being improved. And one of the reasons they like PDT and why the local governments and local people are so supportive of PDT is that they recognize that we’re actively trying to change this, that we’re trying to drive money into the local economy, and we’re doing it.

One of the frustrations that I found as a diplomat and now as somebody who’s in the aid industry, is that you pull a random project proposal or project description, from something that’s funded by an international agency in a place like Afghanistan or Somalia and read it, and it will says things like, “This project will seek to support the creation of conditions that will facilitate empowerment of locals to improve this, this, this and this.” But it doesn’t actually do anything. It doesn’t actually say anything. It talks about setting in place processes and holding workshops and this and that, whereas what we’re doing is very simple, we’re pushing money into the economy, we’re making sure Afghan businessmen will get more money and create jobs, and so it’s very tangible, and so they see it.

Compare that to the internationals, they’re not always as supportive because our mere presence implicitly criticizes the aid industry. We’re basically saying that things aren’t working, things are incredibly inefficient. There are so many problems in the way that the international community does its job, whether it’s in Rwanda or Afghanistan, that we’re only having a fraction of the impact we should be having.

When we go to the UN and say, “Listen, we’re going to help you create a Mission Start-up Field Guide,” what we’re also saying implicitly is, “Oh my God, it’s been 50 years of peacekeeping and you still haven’t created a Mission Start-up Field Guide”. So while we’re not that overtly critical, we’re implicitly critical and we don’t get this sort of open-arm support form the internationals anyways.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Is anyone else doing what you’re doing?

Scott Gilmore: No.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: And why is that?

Scott Gilmore: Well, because it’s not sexy. It’s not sexy, for example, with the donors. The donors, frankly, are much more likely to look at supporting a conference on gender empowerment in Afghanistan, or a workshop that supports capacity building for empowering Afghan government officials because that checks off all the boxes. They’re less likely to get behind something that does something as dull as fixing a logistic system or a communication system, or fixing the way that the UN hires, or the way that the donors plan because it’s just not sexy.

So we don’t have any competitors, but that’s changing because we’ve been remarkably successful. In five years, the impact that we’ve had on peacekeeping, the impact that we’ve had on the way aid is spent has been pretty significant, and now in these difficult economic times a lot of agencies, a lot of Canadian NGOs in particular, are really suffering because money is being cut back, whereas with us we’ve doubled every year. We’ve gotten twice as much donor money every year than the year before and so people begin to realize, “wait a second, these guys are attracting attention and they’re doing good work”, and so we’re now seeing some agencies trying to replicate what we’re doing.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: The reason I ask is because there’s no shortage of people who are critical of development in a broad sense, you know, this idea that Western countries are imposing their solutions to other countries’ problems with just a broad stroke, but you don’t do that.

Scott Gilmore: You know, I find in Canada and in New York, every week there is a conference, or seminar, or brown bag lunch being hosted by agencies, you know the usual suspects of Montreal or Ottawa, to talk about these issues. The neo-imperialism of aid trying to impose these evil World Bank policies on these poor unsuspecting aid recipients.

I frankly have no time for them because the vast majority of the people that are attending these conferences are academics who have had no experience on the ground. They’re espousing positions on behalf of Kenyans or Afghans or others without having actually spent too much time in those places, and they’re using theoretical arguments and ridiculous jargon to make these positions. And when you go in the ground you have to dig pretty hard, for example in Kabul, to find an Afghan who says the international community should pull out here, who says it’s worse now than it was before, you have to dig pretty hard. But you can find one or two of them, and the one and two you can find, get flown to Canada, they get put on the talk shows and they get moved around to universities and they stand up at these conferences and, quite frankly, it’s ridiculous.

I can tell you that the Afghans that I know roll their eyes at these arguments because what they’re more concerned about right now is the fact that their girls can now go to school. Or that fact that the infant mortality rate in Afghanistan has dropped, from 2001 to now, so significantly that every year 30,000 babies survive to their first year who wouldn’t have otherwise under the Taliban. That’s more than all the children in Ottawa under the age of five. So it’s very easy for an academic to stand up and say, “Oh, it’s worse now, we’re trying to impose these Western ideals on a culture that doesn’t want them,” but it’s pretty hard to do that when there’s 30,000 kids looking at you.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: I’m wondering about then, what works and what should be avoided because, no matter the social change that has been sparked by the regime change in Afghanistan, there’s still a pretty brutal war going on, and there’s a lot of combat and Canadians know all about it. What about that strategy?

Scott Gilmore: Well listen, Afghanistan’s a mess, there’s no denying it. And the war, I hesitate to comment too explicitly on what Canada’s doing in Afghanistan right now and what’s working and what’s not, but it is a horrible, horrible mess. And in many ways and many places or parts of Afghanistan, things are worse now than they were ten years ago, there’s no denying it.

But here’s the moral dilemma that I face as a Canadian voter, as somebody whose spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, as somebody whose has worked in Afghanistan; it’s that it’s going to be very, very difficult for them to be happy ending in Afghanistan, but if we were to pull out now, whether it’s pull out Canada’s military, or reduce our aid or withdraw our efforts to just urban centres, it will reduce the moral angst that we have to deal with here in Canada, it will make it easier for Canada politicians, but people will be suffering on the ground.

If one were to do the thought experiment to say, ok let’s say, you can’t pass a Canadian campus without seeing all the posters about “Stop Bush’s war, pull out now”, so let’s imagine, let’s just do that thought experiment, let’s pull out. Let’s pull out all the troops, pull out all of the Canadian forces, what’s going to happen?

Well, let’s say we try to keep our aid there. We’ll only be able to keep our aid there for a handful of months. People forget that before September 11th, the Taliban had kicked out every Western aid agency, and in fact in the days before September 11th, they’d even kicked out the last few Doctors Without Borders that were there. So that would happen again because we would also have to accept that the Taliban will be able to push out the fledging Afghan military and Afghan government.

So the aid’s gone now, the military’s gone, what’s going to happen to the Afghan people? Well, there won’t be any clusterbombs, that’s for sure. There won’t be any collateral damage anymore, but you will go back to the beheadings in the markets and in the stadiums, you will go back to things like the typical way (pre-2001) for Afghan prisoners to be executed, which was to put them into a shipping container and do one of two things; leave it in the sun until the people inside it literally cooked to death, or if you were merciful you threw in a couple grenades.

I will never forget in 2002 when I first entered Kabul, there was all of these shipping containers lined along the side of the road that had been blown up from the inside and I couldn’t figure out how they were damaged this way, and that’s what it was from. The Taliban, or the other warlords would push their enemies into these shipping containers, throw in a grenade, and that was the end of it.

So when you do a thought experiment about us pulling out of Afghanistan and just accepting defeat now, it’s a pretty miserable place that you end up with. None of the girls would be going to school, the infant mortality rate would go back up, the women would be pushed out of civil service, and so this is the dilemma I struggle with. Where things are going well, but the international community is not doing a very good job, frankly, but if we throw in the towel the alternative is pretty nasty.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So does that mean sticking with Afghanistan until it’s helicopters on the roof of the US embassy?

Scott Gilmore: Yeah, see that’s the struggle. You know, if your neighbour’s house is on fire and there’s kids on the upper floor who are screaming for help, how long do you try saving them even when you know that the house is going to burn down? And I don’t know the answer to that. It’s a decision I’m glad I don’t have to make. But it’s a debate that’s not being had in Canada, unfortunately, because both sides are being disingenuous.

On the side of those who are for keeping us in Afghanistan, one of the things that’s frustrating me is they’ve continually changed the reasons why as we get worse and worse at it. Originally we were in Afghanistan to get rid of Al Qaeda, and then we went into Afghanistan to cut poppies and opium, and then it was for women, and then it was for economic development, and then it was for AfPak. And as each reason becomes less and less likely to succeed, they change the reasons, so they skew the debate.

The other side, those that want us to pull out, they skew the debate as well because they talk about well, you know, we could be doing so much more in Sudan, that’s a usual, you know, the Canadian military should pull out of there and we should go back to being peacekeepers in Sudan. Well there are two problems with that. Canada has almost never been a peacekeeping nation. No one’s asking for Canadian peacekeepers anywhere, and surely they’re not asking for them in Sudan. The Sudanese government would never allow Canadian peacekeepers in Sudan. And the situation with Sudan is just as messy and just as complicated, but we don’t know about it because there are very few people reporting on south Sudan and Darfur.

It’s a very poor debate that we’re having in Canada and it’s a very, very difficult moral dilemma, and I’m glad I’ve got a day job that doesn’t force me to resolve either one of them.

Scott Gilmore

This is the first in our relaunched series of podcasts from This Magazine. Over the next few months (we’ll go at least to the beginning of summer and then likely take a break) we hope to introduce you to some of Canada’s most interesting thinkers, talkers, and doers in politics, art, and activism. I’ll be splitting the podcasting duties with Nick Taylor-Vaisey, an Ottawa-based journalist and frequent contributor to the magazine. We’ll also hear from other contributors as we go along.

Today, Nick brings us the first entry in this new series, a conversation with Scott Gilmore of Peace Dividend Trust, a development NGO based in Ottawa and New York, with projects currently underway in Afghanistan, East Timor, and Haiti. PDT essentially promotes a buy-local strategy for international development, helping connect international aid agencies with local suppliers in the countries they work in. By directing funds to local businesses, PDT believes they see faster, more stable economic recovery in post-conflict zones, with lower overhead costs for funders and higher incomes for local businesspeople.

We’ll put up the transcript of this interview on the blog at This.org shortly, as we hope to do with all of these podcasts.

Please note that Listen to This isn’t yet available in the iTunes podcast directory; we expect it will be soon.

Update, 15:42 — So, uh, in a textbook rookie mistake I posted the podcast without actually attaching the MP3. It’s fixed now. Sorry!

Supporters of the Tamil Tigers protest outside the U.S. Consulate in Toronto, spring 2009. Photo by Mark Blinch/Reuters.

I can smell chilies and spices in the cool night air. A few Tamil men and women are handing out biryani in Styrofoam containers to protesters gathered in front of Toronto’s U.S. Consulate. It is after 11 p.m. Stacks of bottled water sit next to a barricade. A few women in down jackets are slumped in lawn chairs. There are about 1,000 Tamil men, women, and children standing around. Occasionally, they shout slogans half-heartedly: “President Obama… save the Tamils!” and “Who bombed the safety zone…Sri Lankan government!”

Last winter, I watched tens of thousands of Tamils march Toronto’s streets, protesting the shelling of Tamil civilians in northern Sri Lanka. A vicious civil war had divided the country for decades and was grinding to its inevitable end. The state slaughtered civilians as it regained territory that had belonged to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The LTTE also shot and killed Tamils fleeing the combat zone. Estimates ranged from 7,000 to 20,000 Tamils killed.

On this night in May, Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa has announced victory. The dispirited crowd at the consulate knows the LTTE is finished. Only a few of the distinctive rebel flags are unfurled.

As I walk through the crowd I watch Keerthana Kaneshalingam, age 12. Her lone sweet voice pummels the sombre silence, as other teenagers hold the microphone steady for her. “Recognize…Tamil Eelam!” she calls, referring to a Tamil homeland. “Media, media… open your eyes!”

“I seen a lot of things in Sri Lanka,” she says as she takes a break. “I feel very strong for my country. I feel like I want to stop the war.” She tells me about the terror of interrogation by the army.

I find my friend in the crowd and stand next to him. He tells me someone just took his picture and that he “smiled sweetly.” Do they know he is Sinhalese, the majority ethnic group in Sri Lanka? I am Tamil by descent, but people often tell me I look Sinhalese.

A 16-year-old girl approaches us and says, “So, do you guys support the Tamil Tigers?” I say that I’m a journalist, interested in hearing what people are thinking right now. She explains that Sinhalese people have been trying to disrupt the protests. Someone else complains about us to the police.

Constable R. Manoharan, a Tamil, walks over and begins to ask me something in Tamil. “I’m a journalist,” I say in English (my Tamil isn’t very good). As I talk to him, people start to close in around us and it feels like there is less oxygen in the air.

Different people keep asking me if I’m Tamil. “I am Tamil but I don’t speak it very well,” I say. The protesters are suspicious, likely because I was taking notes and not shouting slogans.

“We can’t tell you to leave,” says Manoharan. But maybe you should, goes unsaid. Another officer suggests we stay on the periphery. There are at least 50 police officers—Toronto cops, RCMP, and OPP—but I’m not reassured.

My friend tells me later that while I was talking with Manoharan, a few Tamil men hissed and swore at him in Sinhala, saying they would “fuck him up the ass.” I decide it’s time to leave. We walk down a side street. Several men follow and try to surround us. “Rajapaksa’s whore,” one of them sneers in Tamil.

I’ve watched the chaos of Sri Lanka’s civil war from a distance for most of my life. As a journalist, I’ve reported on Sri Lankan politics for the past four years, trying to understand the violence between Tamils, Sinhalese and Muslims that has followed us here to the Canadian diaspora. I came to Canada in 1974 as a child. I returned to Sri Lanka for short visits in 1993, just after President Ranasinghe Premadasa was assassinated by the Tigers, and in 2003, during the ceasefire. I’ve gone searching for stories to understand the psyche of this war, to clarify the details of history and revenge, and to understand my own blood and bones. It’s a messy, complicated history. But I’m convinced that it is one we need to understand, especially since the end of the war last spring. In the aftermath, how do we nurture democracy, keep state power in check, and live together in a multi-ethnic society?

On this journey, I have talked to journalists in exile, survivors of LTTE torture and Sri Lankan state terror, human rights activists, writers, academics, students, and politicos young and old from all walks of life.

It’s the former Tamil militants and activists who fled Sri Lanka under threat from both the LTTE and the state that have made the deepest impression on me. They understand, first-hand and at great personal cost, why the armed struggle failed. As they see it—and I agree—the survival of the Tamil community lies in building alliances with the Sinhalese and Muslims, to create security, dignity, and equality for all Sri Lankans.

As we walk away from the hostility of the protesters in front of the U.S. Consulate, I wonder if they would consider the irony of their actions. They assumed I was a Sinhalese spy because, in LTTE politics, there is only one way to be Tamil: unconditional support for the LTTE and its political fantasy of an exclusively Tamil separate state.

Instead of reaching out to all Sri Lankans—Tamil, Sinhalese, and Muslim—to challenge state barbarity, the LTTE hunted down, killed, or chased away the few Sinhalese living in Tamil areas after the war started in 1983. They expelled 75,000 Muslims from Jaffna, the northern peninsula in Sri Lanka, and massacred Muslims in the east in 1990. There is no question that Tamils have very real grievances about discrimination and state terror, but the LTTE’s armed struggle was, in reality, a fascist killing machine that failed to create security for Tamils.

After the British left Sri Lanka in 1948, the Sinhalese majority ruled with policies that discriminated against Tamils. Tamils were killed in pogroms between 1956 and 1983. Sinhala became the sole official language. Tamils had to obtain higher marks than Sinhalese to get into university. And government-sponsored Sinhalese settlements were set up in Tamil areas. When the LTTE killed several Sinhalese settlers, many Tamils were massacred. Finally, Tamil voices were excluded from the political sphere.

Last spring in Sri Lanka, Sinhalese people danced in the streets, celebrating the Sri Lankan army’s victory over the Tigers. But the root cause of the conflict remains: discrimination against minorities. An estimated 100,000 Sri Lankans, mostly Tamils, died during the 26-year conflict. The war ended with an estimated 280,000 Tamils held as prisoners in atrocious conditions in internment camps. The government says it is screening for Tiger cadres.

Tamil civilians now living in Sri Lankan internment camps. Photo by Ho New/Reuters.

But surrendered militants in the camps have no further motivation to fight and no loyalty to the Tigers. In the final weeks of war, they witnessed their leadership’s callous use of waves of cadres in suicide attacks and civilian shields. By not allowing the right to freedom of movement to the majority in the camps, the state is creating a breeding ground for a new militancy. If displaced people in the camps were free to leave—to go back to their homes or stay with relatives—then those who remain could be looked after better and there would be no humanitarian crisis..

Furthermore, the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime is perpetuating the practices that led to the war. The Prevention of Terrorism Act and Emergency Regulations, which were used as an excuse to disappear more than 2,000 people in the last three years, most of them young Tamil men, are being upheld. Despite massacring the LTTE leadership and cadres left in the combat zone, there are plans to increase the number of troops. And, in his first speech to parliament after the end of the war, the president said that there were no minorities in Sri Lanka,  but failed to add that there was no majority either.  As he spoke of patriotic Sri Lankans standing behind the national flag, dominated by the lion that symbolizes the Sinhalese, he implied that Sinhala majoritarianism would continue. Under such circumstances, the minority Tamil population cannot feel that they too are equal citizens.

Tamils are not the only ones suffering under this regime. Journalists and activists of any ethnicity who criticize the state face verbal and physical attacks, both from official sources and nationalist vigilantes. (Defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the president’s brother, is known to equate criticism of government policies with treason.)

But things change fast in Sri Lanka. Four activists I talked to say this is a watershed opportunity to transform Sri Lankan politics and unite its broken civil society. They tell me the strategy of any social movement is to not become paralyzed, but to galvanize the silent moderate majority to take action, for when the right moment in history comes along and change is possible. They believe that moment is now.

On this typical February night, Chinniah Rajeshkumar cooks okra and potato curries at 1 a.m. in a Brooklyn apartment. Other activists and writers are drinking beer and wine, dancing to Bollywood songs, intermittently checking their emails, and, as always, talking Sri Lankan politics. The apartment, which belongs to a Sri Lanka Democracy Forum member, is a war room. During the week, the activists draft an SLDF statement, prepare for their talks, and give media interviews.

I finally get a chance to interview Rajeshkumar, 53, when I accompany him to JFK Airport, the night he leaves New York. He wears a grey wool coat and ties a black-and-yellow-striped scarf around his neck. He is Leonard Cohenesque in his thin-rimmed glasses and close-cropped hair, diffident and understated.

Rajeshkumar speaks slowly and thoughtfully as he tells me about his early years as a militant. As a teenager he used to read Tamil nationalist papers arguing that the fact that Tamils do not have a separate state is the root of their suffering. In 1974, at age 18, he met the Tamil New Tigers, a handful of guerrillas who robbed banks to buy arms. In 1976 TNT changed its name to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and Rajeshkumar became a committed militant; his nom de guerre was Ragavan. But the Tigers’ evolving methods troubled him.

“I opposed internal killings and the killing of people in other militant organizations,” he says. He felt problems should be settled by talking; he says he could see a “continuous pattern” of killing happening. But Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the LTTE, thought he alone should be in charge of the entire Tamil population, with the right to punish or kill those who disobeyed his orders. In 1982, while in India, Rajeshkumar left the Tigers.

Then the 1983 riots happened. An estimated 2,000 to 3,000 Tamils were butchered, torched, or beaten to death by Sinhalese mobs armed with voters’ lists provided by the government, which told them where Tamils lived. This anti-Tamil pogrom occurred after the Tigers killed 13 soldiers in Jaffna. It was the catalyst for civil war. Hundreds of Tamil youth flocked to the LTTE and other militant groups to fight the Sri Lankan state. India got involved and began to arm and train Tamil militants in camps all over South India. Dissent was not tolerated and internal killings were common.

The riots motivated Rajeshkumar to rejoin the LTTE. He wanted to change the organization. But it didn’t work. Rajeshkumar says watching unpoliticized youth become militarized scared him. He realized Prabhakaran no longer needed him, as the Tigers’ ranks swelled and cadres pledged unquestioning allegiance to the LTTE leader. He left the LTTE for good in 1984 at the age of 28.

As the lights of Brooklyn rush past the car window, I can see Rajeshkumar’s silhouette in the back seat as he remembers the trauma and heartache of leaving the movement. “I was not able to talk to people. In a normal conversation, I didn’t know what to talk about, whether it was a house or food,” he says. “It was totally alien for me.”

He lived underground in Chennai, in a poor fishermen’s neighbourhood, hiding from the LTTE, doing manual labour and working for a smuggler to support others who had left militant groups, struggling to find food and shelter. He was disillusioned and heartbroken. “I was very angry and disappointed because we believed in certain things. For a while I was not able to come to terms,” he says. “Now I can see what is wrong, what we did.” In 1986, he fled to the U.K., where he continues to live in exile.

We arrive at the airport and say goodbye. On the way back to Brooklyn, Rajeshkumar’s friend tells me a story. After Rajeshkumar left the Tigers and was living in South India, a spy, working for the Tigers, was discovered among the former militants. A few men decided to kill the spy. Rajeshkumar found out and rushed to the place where the murder was to take place. He argued that if they killed the man, then they would be no better than the Tigers, whose violent methods they opposed. He was able to save the man’s life.

When I contact Rajeshkumar a few months after the war’s end, he tells me he fears for the surrendered Tigers in the camps. “The armed forces have no hesitation to kill or torture those suspected of having connections with the LTTE; I do not believe LTTE cadres captured would receive humane treatment,” he wrote to me in an email. “I also fear that senior cadres will be tortured and killed without a trace.” He believes low-ranking Tigers should be given amnesty and support to rebuild their lives, and child soldiers should be returned to their families.

He also says prosecution for war crimes should cut both ways: “If the government presses charges against the LTTE, armed forces that violated the norms of war should also be brought to justice.”

On the Brooklyn-bound Q train, 56-year-old Nirmala Rajasingam begins to sing a Tamil-movement song. It’s close to midnight. Four others, sitting across from her, sing along. Several other passengers on the train stare straight ahead; they don’t even flinch at this group of drunken human-rights activists crooning in Tamil. Rajasingam sits on the edge of her seat, her hair frizzy and wild, brown coat open, and drums the palm of her hand on a metal pole. “All these things that seem immutable and unchangeable can change; do change,” she sings.

Rajeshkumar and Rajasingam met after they’d both left the Tigers. They’ve been partners for more than 20 years and have a 22-year-old daughter and a 19-year-old son. Sometimes Rajasingam introduces Rajeshkumar as “the father of my children.” They’ve had a turbulent relationship at times, but their passion for politics keeps them together.

In 1979 the government was abducting and disappearing Tamils. Rajasingam supported Tamil militants fighting state terror. She began talking to all the militant groups and held discussions in her home. She helped the LTTE with practical tasks.

“We wanted to bring about a socialist revolution. Rajani [her sister] and I wanted to join the armed struggle,” she says. “Whatever we preached, we wanted to practice.”

For working with the Tigers, Rajasingam was the first woman arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act in 1982. In prison, she met poor Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim women serving sentences for murder, for female infanticide, for fraud. The prostitutes taught her to speak Sinhala. “The prostitutes were great fun,” she says. “They would get arrested, serve their sentences, and be back in prison two months later. ‘Nirmala, you’re still here!’ they’d say.”

Prison changed her profoundly. “[The other prisoners] had seen the enormity of life’s difficulties in a personal way,” she says. “I was just a romantic revolutionary who was very hard and exacting about people’s commitment to politics. [Prison] mellowed me.”

After she had been in detention for 22 months, the LTTE helped Rajasingam escape from prison to Chennai, India. She was appalled that the Tigers’ leader, Prabhakaran, had just ordered one of his henchmen to kill the leader of another militant group. The attempt failed. “I thought, oh my god, why are we doing this? Who made this decision?”

Rajasingam left the LTTE in December 1984 and hid out in South India until she was able to escape to the U.K. She was still married to her first husband, also an ex-Tiger, but met Rajeshkumar shortly after.

In 1986, the LTTE began to systematically massacre the other militant groups that had formed to stand up to the state. With the help of the Indian government, the Tigers became a huge army overnight. “They were no longer accountable to the ordinary people in Sri Lanka,” Rajasingam says. “They became warlords. They could tell people what to do instead of listening to find out what the people really wanted.”

Tamil nationalists and Tiger supporters often say the non-violent struggle against state terror failed and the armed struggle was unavoidable. But both Rajasingam and Rajeshkumar say Tamil politicians did not attempt to create political discussions with sectors of society such as labour groups and women’s groups. And civil rights campaigns and non-violence were never seriously attempted.

Rajasingam says organizing at the grassroots level would have given the Tamil people tools to rein in the Tigers. “They wouldn’t have put up with all this nonsense that the Tigers trotted out, like killing somebody and saying, ‘He’s a traitor, so we killed him.’” After the LTTE’s rapid rise, such resistance was impossible: they demolished civil society by killing social activists, members of women’s groups, and Marxists.

Indian arms and training launched the Tigers as a ferocious militant force, and financial support from the Tamil diaspora sustained them. Both were toxic as they took away the Tamil people’s control of their struggle for rights. As the LTTE’s power base grew outside Sri Lanka, it could treat local Tamils with contempt: forced recruitment of children, torture camps, assassinations of dissenters. With its link to the Tigers, the Tamil diaspora has acquired far more significance than it deserves, says Rajasingam. “They are removed from the theatre of war. So they really cannot know and understand the interests of people who are suffering.”

Pressure from abroad, including sections of Canada’s large Tamil community, is disconnected from the reality on the ground in Sri Lanka. Tamils in the diaspora should play a secondary role, and that includes SLDF, she says. “The people [in Sri Lanka] have to decide.”

Though Rajasingam does believe uniting Tamils and Sinhalese is the key to lasting peace: “This quest should be an alliance from all communities. The realization of Tamil aspirations will come from that.”

She also says Sinhalese progressives have a leading role to play and mentions Lasantha Wickrematunge, the Sinhalese editor of the Sunday Leader who was killed in January 2009 for his criticism of the Rajapaksa regime. “Lone voices come up and they get crushed,” she says. “Sinhalese progressives must band together and speak up for minorities.”

Early the next morning, Rajasingam and I head down to the Democracy Now news studio, located in a red and white firehouse in lower Manhattan. During an interview, the host asks her whether she agrees that what is happening in Sri Lanka is genocide. It’s a loaded term, one often invoked during last winter’s protests.

Rajasingam answers, saying there were human-rights violations and war crimes by both sides. She explains the term prevents anyone from engaging with the Sri Lankan state, conceals the LTTE’s own atrocities against Tamils, and undervalues the more than 2,000, mostly Tamils, who have been disappeared by state forces in recent years. “Genocide” justifies armed struggle and alienates Sinhalese people from Tamils even more.

On another night, while we are walking back to the Brooklyn apartment after yet another panel discussion, Rajasingam reminisces about the late-night curries, the drinking, the dancing to Bollywood tunes. “It’s an escape from all the horrible things, from the overwhelming knowledge of everything we have to do,” she says. “And the guilt of not having done it.”

Based in Mumbai, Rohini Hensman, 61, travels to Sri Lanka once or twice a year and writes extensively on the ethnic conflict. She is a Sri Lankan Tamil who is part Burgher (Sri Lankan with European ancestry) and came to Toronto in April for an international conference on South Asian solidarity.

Tamil protesters wear masks of LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. Photo by Babu Babu/Reuters.

Hensman is warm and immediately disarming when I meet her at the home of a Toronto Sri Lankan activist, her hair tucked away in a bun, a burgundy shawl over her shoulders. She tells me about the 1958 anti-Tamil pogrom. Her family was living in a predominantly Sinhalese area in Mount Lavinia, south of Colombo. “One of our neighbours came and said she’d heard that gangs were coming,” says Hensman.

Hensman laughs as she remembers that her parents started to make Molotov cocktails. Sinhalese neighbours rallied around them. One young Sinhalese woman close to the family threatened to throw herself in the well if they didn’t run for their lives. Hensman’s family was packed into a car, and, braving the curfew, neighbours took them to another Sinhalese family’s home to hide out.

“That experience shaped my vision,” says Hensman. “It taught me that love crosses these barriers.” She rejects the notion held by Tamil nationalists in the diaspora that Tamils will survive only with a separate state. “If you accept the legitimacy of an exclusively Tamil, and as it happens, totalitarian state, how do you argue against an exclusively Sinhala totalitarian state?” Hensman asks. And she warns Sinhalese nationalists that the culture of impunity that has so oppressed Tamils (fuelled by Sinhala nationalism) will someday be used against the Sinhalese: “If you want to keep the country safe for your children, you’ve got to stop the kinds of atrocities that are being done to Tamil civilians.”

I reach her four months later in Mumbai and we continue our conversation over the phone. Since our last meeting, she has written several articles on the situation in the camps and tells me the majority of Sinhalese people don’t know that Tamils are being held against their will. This is startling to hear. The Sinhala-language papers don’t talk about the real conditions in the camps and the English papers often say that Tamils are being taken care of in “welfare camps,” with food, water, and medical care that the rural Sinhalese poor don’t have, she says.

Hensman says groups fighting for Tamil rights must find ways to communicate with the Sinhalese, in the Sinhala language, in print, and in person. What makes this mission difficult, she says, is the fact that, over the last 30 years, the LTTE has assassinated Tamils who were willing to work with the government, talk to Sinhalese people, and who believed that Tamils could thrive only in a multi-ethnic society. For instance, in 1975, the Tigers killed Alfred Duraiappah, a Tamil and mayor of Jaffna town, because he was willing to work with the Sinhala-dominated state. He believed Tamils and Sinhalese could live side by side and was seen as a traitor.

As moderate voices were silenced, either by exile or murder, a narrative of continuous attacks on Tamils developed, with one massacre after another. But Sinhalese have also been attacked by the state. The Sinhala-dominated government massacred an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 Sinhalese during two Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna insurgencies against the government in 1971 and from 1987 to 1989. The Sri Lankan state has easily killed more Sinhalese than the Tigers ever did.

Tamil nationalists and Tiger supporters ignored Sinhalese suffering, instead of taking the opportunity to join forces to fight the state that was terrorizing them both. “I don’t remember much sympathy toward the Sinhalese youth who were rounded up and massacred at the time,” says Hensman.

The 1983 riots are often seen as the end of the possibility of Tamils and Sinhalese living together. But coexistence has been a fact of life all over the island for hundreds of years as people have migrated and been intertwined through marriage.

From a distance, it is possible to see ordinary Sinhalese people as racist, says Hensman. “If you live among the Sinhalese it’s not the case. Translating political events into the social situation on the ground doesn’t come that easily if you don’t spend time in the different communities.”

Hensman thinks a revival of a strong left is critical for the future of democracy in Sri Lanka. Historically, Sri Lankan leftist politics was multi-ethnic, organizing at a grassroots level to fight for the rights of the working class and all minorities. But a breakaway group of Sinhalese leftists formed an alliance with the state in 1964, abandoning minorities and strengthening right-wing Sinhala nationalism. Many Tamil leftists drifted into Tamil nationalist parties and militant groups.

Right now, says Hensman, remnants of the left feel they have to work with the government instead of working at a grassroots level. Hensman says she thinks the left should go back to organizing among the working class and rural poor—of all ethnicities—to gather a small base with which to challenge the government during the next election.

When Kopalasingham Sritharan left Jaffna in 1990, he was hiding in a truck carrying onions. He could not simply walk out of Jaffna. The LTTE had a pass system; he needed permission to leave rebel territory. And he was haunted by the death of his friend Rajani Thiranagama. The Tigers had just killed her.

Sritharan had been teaching math at Jaffna University. He joined forces with professors Rajan Hoole, Daya Somasundaram, and Rajani Thiranagama to write The Broken Palmyra, a seminal book documenting violations by the Indian army, the Tigers, and the state. “LTTE politics had destroyed the community,” he says. “We needed to bring out the narrative of the people.”

The organization University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) was born. Over the next 20 years, UTHR(J) became the most important organization documenting human-rights abuses in Sri Lanka. And it has captured the voices of the people: Tamils who defied the Tigers and tried to rescue their children from its ranks; and Sinhalese soldiers who risked their lives to save Tamils in the combat zone last winter, among so many other nuances of the war.

Meanwhile, a copy of The Broken Palmyra got into the hands of the Tigers and Thiranagama (Nirmala Rajasingam’s sister) was gunned down by the LTTE on her way home from the university one night in September 1989. After her death, many dissidents fled.

Sritharan, 54, tells me about the stress of standing up to terror. Watching his community disintegrate, years of living underground, his wife’s nightmares, living in fear in Sri Lanka, then in exile in Afghanistan, Nepal, India, uprooting his children again and again, and not being able to stay connected to friends and relatives. “We’ve become very isolated,” he says.

In 2007, Sritharan was awarded the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders, along with his colleague Rajan Hoole, for their work as co-founders of UTHR(J). Through their own investigations in Sri Lanka and with a network of contacts, they have written report after report of human-rights violations by all the actors of war since the late 1980s. Focusing on stories about ordinary people, they’ve documented the heavy price civilians have paid.

For this service, Sritharan has lived under threat from both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan state. He now lives in Toronto with his family and is struggling to live a more open life after decades underground. It is emotionally difficult to reconnect to friends and family he has not talked to in 20 years, he says.

We meet often to talk politics. The only signs of strain are his thin strands of grey hair. Sritharan is soft-spoken and calm despite all that he has endured. He talks about how frustrating it is to be away from Sri Lanka at this crucial time.

“Writing the reports is fine but we are unable to push for change, to organize,” he says. “Unless you’re there and meeting people, it is impossible to get involved.”

While Tamil nationalists who supported the Tigers have taken an all-or-nothing political stance—give us a separate state or we will fight to the death—Sritharan is more pragmatic.

Right now, the government is capitalizing on post-war euphoria to consolidate its power, he explains, and extremist Sinhalese nationalists in the government, who reduced the conflict to a war on terror, have the upper hand. Although the Sinhalese extremists are vociferous, they will not be able to sustain themselves if democratic forces with a broader agenda can act together, he says. The majority of Sinhalese do not support their majoritarian agenda. It is this silent majority that Tamils must reach out to, he believes.

Tamil activists also need to talk to the moderates in the government and challenge them to be more assertive, he says: “Progressive individuals in the government can go to the camps, talk to Tamil people, come out with a confidential report to the government.”

In post-war Sri Lanka, all sides must re-evaluate their past and rebuild a multi-ethnic, multilingual country, but the current regime has shown little inclination toward that, Sritharan says. Tamils are weak politically—made so by the destructive politics of the Tigers— and Sritharan doesn’t believe that now is the time to push for a political solution. The most critical issue is the Tamils in the internment camps. He says people should be sent home to start rebuilding their normal lives. “We need to strategize and push for reconstruction, rehabilitation, allow Tamils to go back to their communities, empower them to engage with the government to do meaningful development—and hold the government accountable,” he says.

Sritharan strategizes on impulse, always thinking ahead, sure that Sri Lanka’s future is malleable, not written in stone by nationalists. The first step, he says, is to create an environment where Tamils can work with, and criticize, the government if they want to, without being killed.

Sritharan says he feels accusing the state of war crimes at this stage would only isolate the Sinhalese people and strengthen the extremists. He says it would be more effective to work on accountability for human-rights violations, like the Action Contre la Faim case where 17 Sri Lankan aid workers, 16 Tamil and one Muslim, were killed execution-style by security forces in Mutur. “It’s not about putting the blame on the Sinhalese people,” he says. “It’s about the state and its degeneration.”

Sritharan gets more specific about his strategy for Tamils now: first, identify who the Sinhalese progressive political and social forces are; second, work with them to poke holes in Sinhala nationalist ideology; and third, ask them to visit Tamil villages and organize public talks to find out what people want, and help Tamils open up and discuss their needs in a safe space.

If this does not happen, then any kind of peace and development that is forged will be too fragile to last. And Sri Lankans will once again be at the mercy of extremism: a world where Tamil nationalists believe a legitimate road to secession is taking away the very rights they are fighting for; a world where Sinhalese nationalists believe that Sri Lanka is only for the Sinhalese.

“Tamils and Sinhalese should constantly challenge each other,” he says. “You don’t wait for things to happen. You play a role and consciously work toward that end.”

This tribe of Sri Lankan-Tamil activists embodies a different kind of philosophy: to work toward peace by creating real justice in Sri Lanka. It’s a vision that moves away from war politics and addresses social injustices that Tamils, Sinhalese, and Muslims have all suffered, and that have been pushed aside for decades. As postwar euphoria fades, the government will no longer be able to blame the LTTE and the war budget for the shattered state of the economy. It’s a void that needs to be filled with a united, multi-ethnic democratic challenge to the state.

But this is not the post-independence Sri Lanka of 1948. LTTE terror has assaulted the Sinhalese psyche for 30 years and an entire generation of Tamils has grown up shaped by the nightmare of disappearances by the state. And the LTTE has been an overpowering force, with its culture of fear, controlling the psychology of the Tamil community. The challenge for democratic forces will be to bring home the message of interdependence: if you are Sinhalese and you don’t fight for Tamil rights, then the totalitarian state you foster with your silence will soon take away your rights too; and if you are Tamil and you do not forge links and understand the tremendous loss of life of Sinhalese soldiers—poor people who enlisted so their families could eat—then Tamil rights will never be achieved.

In a totalitarian situation, most people learn what they have to do to survive. But these four Sri Lankan–Tamil activists have stood up to terror and have paid dearly for it in different ways. Forced into exile, on the run, having lost friends and family to assassinations, they still struggle for the rights of all Sri Lankans. And that’s exactly why their vision is so vital, at such a crucial historic moment.

Photo credit Melanie Gordon

What was shocking, fascinating, a little destabilizing though was that these pieces didn’t just depict free; they were free. Yes, people could take home a piece of original artwork for $0. Well, there was a “creative exchange” element in which the person who received the piece was asked to write an e-mail or letter back to the artist. But there was no payment in the way we usually understand it: the way that pays grocery bills, rewards labour and creativity, and often makes art seem so completely inaccessible to most of us.

Catherine Mellinger, a local textile artist who organized the exhibit along with her friend, photographer Melanie Gordon, explained the system to me. People came early in the day and signed up to receive red stickers. About 75 people signed up for a total available 50 stickers (and pieces). Then, at 3 o’clock people could come back and put a sticker to claim their pieces. The only qualification was that the project’s organizers would not mediate disputes. If two people wanted the same work of art, they would just have to sort it out themselves.

It was an accidental social experiment that apparently reflected well on humankind, or at least the particular segment of it that was wandering around the Distillery District for Doors Open Toronto, an event where some of Toronto’s most prominent historic sites open their doors to the public for free, on a Saturday afternoon. There was no clumping around a single prized piece. People spread out pretty evenly over the different pieces – freed from the strictures of cost, apparently there is a natural diversity of tastes. Some came early to stake out their claim, but even they seemed willing to negotiate. Many of the people who took part in the exchange were artists themselves, who are normally among the last people with the money to build an art collection. Others, like me, happened on the event while wandering around the Doors Open festivities, and had probably never before imagined owning a piece of original art for themselves.

Photo credit Melanie Gordon

It was just one of the much-needed doses of optimism that seem to be popping up, as people explore what can be done without money in a time when there is much less of it. But it still begs the question: is free fair? It’s hard making money as an artist, Mellinger conceded, and not everyone felt it was right to add to that the pressure to give work away for free. As a journalist, I don’t need to be told twice about the perils of giving work away for nothing.

Free theatre in the park, free museum and art gallery admission, free newspapers and magazines, free yoga, free live music. Last week’s cover story in New York Magazine celebrates the growth of accessible arts and culture in a city that one year ago was still all about money. It could, the magazine says with uncharacteristic earnestness, usher in a kinder, gentler, more egalitarian era for New York. I hope that last weekend’s exhibit at the Case Goods Warehouse, and what seemed to my eye like the general popularity of Doors Open, are signs that Canadian cities are not far behind. But I also hope, as the magazine failed to address, that when there is once again more money to go around, many of us will be willing to repay the favour to these artists, musicians and writers a bit more literally.

The Octopus Project puts on a free exhibition – though not always with free artwork – every two months, based around a particular theme. They’ll be taking a break in July, but should be back in September. For more information go to octopusproject.ca.

It is because of cases like this that a group of activists is lobbying Toronto council to adopt a policy that would prevent city workers, including police, from inquiring about the immigration status of people seeking services. It would also prevent them from passing on information about immigration status to any federal or provincial agency. “We felt it was essential for a lot of people we were working with to be able to access services without fear,” says Sima Zerehi, a campaign organizer with No One Is Illegal.

Zerehi says the idea came about in 2003, after organizers heard of a similar policy in New York City and began to realize how many of the non-status people they worked with in immigration detention centres had ended up there as a result of trying to access city services. Non-status persons, sometimes called illegal immigrants, are people who entered the country legally but lost their right to remain here, either because their refugee claim was denied or they overstayed a tourist visa. Until they are ordered deported or granted status, they are stuck in a legal limbo, with no official immigration status. And with an estimated 20,000 to 200,000 non-status persons living in Canada—half of those in the Toronto area—Zerehi says it’s imperative the city make it easier for them to access essential services without fear of being reported to immigration authorities.

Campaign organizers say non-status persons are entitled to services because the Canadian economy benefits from their labour. “Communities without status do contribute in a positive way to our economy. There really isn’t any reason why they shouldn’t be offered adequate services,” says Zerehi.

Police routinely ask about immigration status when investigating unrelated matters, such as domestic violence complaints. “If, through the normal course of an investigation, we find people with various immigration statuses, obviously we communicate that to Immigration Canada,” says Sergeant Jim Muscat of the Toronto Police Service.

That’s precisely the kind of situation organizers would like to change. But they realize that even having a policy might not make a difference immediately. For example, schools in Ontario are required to admit children whose parents are “unlawfully in Canada.” Yet, according to Martha Mackinnon, executive director of the Justice for Children and Youth Legal Clinic, about 100 children were denied access to Toronto schools this past year, even though the school board has a policy of admitting non-status children. “We took action, and to our knowledge, everyone was admitted,” she says. “Unfortunately, I think that we need more work on the implementation of the policy, especially at a local school level,” concedes school board trustee Bruce Davis.

With the campaign still in its early days, organizers are hopeful. Mayor David Miller supports the principle that all city residents should have access to city services: “The general policy in our administration is that, unless legally obliged, city workers do not ask about immigration status.” But despite his tacit endorsement and the fact that a variety of community organizations and three city councillors have come on board, the city’s official position is that non-status persons already have access to some services, such as public health nurses and homeless shelters, and that the city is prevented by provincial legislation from providing other services, such as social housing. Under the Social Housing Reform Act, for example, every person in the household must have legal status in order for the entire family to be placed on the waiting list.

Organizers say their next step is to hold a public forum this fall. The sooner council addresses the issue, the better, says Cindy Cowan, executive director of the women’s shelter Nellie’s, who sees first-hand what happens when women at risk are afraid to call the police and why a policy is necessary. “It would reduce the fear,” she says, “and enable women to get the support and services they need.”