When Harper prorogued parliament in the closing days of 2009, Canadians took to the streets. Creative Commons photo by Fifth Business.

Britain’s five days of post-election limbo are over as David Cameron, Conservative Party leader and now Prime Minister, announced Britain’s first peacetime coalition government since the 1930s.  Ushering in an era of cross-bench unity, Cameron’s Conservatives will join forces with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democratic Party.  Cameron has appointed six Liberal Democrats to the cabinet, including Clegg as his Deputy Prime Minister.  In a press conference held today, Cameron said: “We are not just announcing a new government and new ministers. We are announcing a new politics. A new politics where the national interest is more important than party interest, where co-operation wins out over confrontation, where compromise, give and take, reasonable, civilized, grown-up behaviour is not a sign of weakness but a sign of strength.”  Clegg added, “Until today, we have been rivals: now we are colleagues. That says a lot about the scale of the new politics which is now beginning to unfold.”

If reading this makes you wonder, as I did, what it would take to see a similar spirit of cooperation sweep Canada’s house of commons, it’s for a good reason. Canadian minority governments—i.e., the last three consecutive ones—are strangely reluctant to form coalitions. Instead of creating solid coalition governments in which the parties are forced to negotiate—in Cameron’s words, creating “a shared agenda and a shared resolve”—Canadian parties tend only to reach across the aisle on a case-by-case basis, leading to constant brinksmanship and partisan sniping.

The exception, of course, came just six weeks after the 2008 elections when an attempted coalition between Liberals and New Democrats, with support from the Bloc Quebecois, would have ousted Stephen Harper’s conservative minority government from power, creating a majority coalition on the Hill. Harper, in response, prorogued parliament to allow the Liberal Party to consume itself with infighting and ultimately scuttle the coalition.

While Canadian politics has been defined by six years of minority government—six years during which the NDP has not meaningfully advanced the cause of proportional representation, by the way—British politicians have realized the power of broad support, and look set to overhaul their electoral system, too. It’s enough to give a Canadian a serious case of coalition envy.

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.

Protesters demonstrating Canada's tar sands development outside the Canadian High Commission in London. Photo by Zoe Cormier.

I was pretty sure I knew what the Canadian flag, held upside down, was supposed to represent. But I had to ask anyway.

Last Monday afternoon, standing outside the Houses of Parliament in London in Parliament square, I held my cell phone aloft with a hundred other protesters, taking part in a “climate flash mob,” a seemingly spontaneous but pre-arranged protest against the British government’s inaction on climate change. Everyone was there to flood MPs with phone calls demanding a fair and effective treaty at Copenhagen this December.

Nearby a man stood, holding an upside-down Canadian flag.

“Sorry to bother you—but why are you holding the Canadian flag upside down?” I asked, a little timidly (I figured with my accent he might clock my Canuck identity and tell me off).

“Flying a flag upside down is the internationally recognized symbol of distress,” he answered. “We are facing a climate emergency—and there is no better symbol for that than the nation of Canada.”

Given that Canada has higher per capita greenhouse gas emissions than any other G8 nation, and was branded the “Colossal Fossil” at climate talks in Poznan, Poland, last year for blocking efforts to arrive at an effective treaty on climate change, I couldn’t argue with him.

In fact, I wasn’t even surprised to see him. Three weeks ago I witnessed a throng of hundreds of Brits march to our High Commission near Trafalgar Square singing “Blame Canada” and denouncing our ever-expanding tar sand operations.

There wasn’t a single defence I could muster—nor could I even be bothered to try.

It’s not often you can find it embarrassing to be Canadian—especially living in England. Jokes about bad teeth, wimpy winters and rampant alcoholism aside, Canadians can easily find wedges to prise apart the British pride: their public education is so patchy and frequently so dismal that fully a fifth of ten year old boys cannot count to ten; the National Health Service has such long wait times than even the leaders of the most left-wing parties send their own kids through the private system (I myself have found OHIP to be far more speedy and responsive in the time I’ve lived here); the racist British National Party has grown so much in popularity in the past few years that they now boast a seat in the European Parliament; and of course, there’s the undeniable, irrepresible and incredibly reprehensible classism that still pervades every pore of British society and that irks every inch of my egalitarian Canadian sensibility.

So like all Canadians, I revel in poking fun at the Brits and pointing out their strange laws and habits wherever possible: “Why does the subway close at 11:30?” “Does that man have to smoke crack directly next to me on the bus?” “You wouldn’t be so short if you didn’t all start smoking at 10 years old.” And I’m not alone. You won’t find an Aussie, Kiwi or Canuck in the country who doesn’t constantly delight in poking fun at the British temperment.

And when it comes to matters of ecology, Canadians, with our undeniable and irrepressible tendency to smugness, feel innately from a very young age that we are the world’s pre-eminent environmental stewards: wholesome, rosy-cheeked hewers of wood and drawers of water. But national narratives are just that: ideas, legends, and myths.

Because when it comes to our actual environmental track record, Canada has no reason for even a smidge of smug patriotism. We lead the developed world in greenhouse gas emissions and have been a consistent impediment to international climate change negotiations. Even China is willing to make more of a verbal pledge to change its ways than we are (even if the gesture is merely symbolic, at least they’ve made it). We not only supplied the uranium dropped on Japan more than 60 years ago; today we still lead the world in uranium production. We are one of the worst culprits when it comes to overfishing: we drained the Atlantic of cod, then blamed the Spanish and the seals. Now we’re doing the same to our west coast salmon, and we can’t even be bothered to call off the hunt on the grizzlies we’re starving.

And now, most embarrassingly, we boast what is rightfully being called “the most destructive project on earth,” the infamous tar sands.

If you take a hard look at the worst ecological offences we have committed, it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that Canada actually has one of the worst environmental track records of any nation. It’s embarrassing.

And when you also take a hard look at how we have treated indigenous and aboriginal groups, our history becomes even more flinch-worthy. Thanks to legal loopholes that leave legal liability for “Indian Affairs” in legal limbo—split between federal and provincial jurisdiction—First Nations reserves have always been more likely to be polluted with radioactive waste from uranium mines, toxic runoff from tar sands operations, and hormone-mimicking gases from petrochemical smokestacks.

Our historical track record, is at the very best, embarrassing. When you throw in our ongoing peddling of asbestos to developing nations and our refusal to allow it to be added to a UN-sanctioned list of toxic substances, our report card is downright humiliating.

The reason is simple: it’s not that Canadians are inherently more wasteful, lazy, or irresponsible than the people of any other nation. But we have behaved in such a wasteful, lazy and irresponsible fashion because we have been gifted with such an enormous, resource-rich landscape—our good fortune has made it incredibly easy to be wasteful, lazy, and irresponsibly profligate consumers of energy. Taking the path of least resistance has never been easier for any group of people, in all the world’s history.

And what is most infuriating is that it is precisely this reputation, of being exemplary in environmental and human rights matters, that allows us to be exactly the opposite. Ignorant of the true nature of our behaviour on the world stage, we have failed to hold our government (and ourselves) to account and to demand better. And because of our (increasingly false) reputation, the rest of the world has failed to hold us to account too.

That is starting to change. The protests in London this September are just the beginning. Environmental campaigners here have pledged to launch a long-term, media-savvy, and vociferous campaign to make the British public aware of what is going on in the tar sands, and to do their part to put and end to the involvement of Britsh banks and extraction companies there. The Canadian flag will continue to hang upside down, the High Commission will continue to be blockaded by indignant protesters, and our national identity will continued to become synonymous with “the most environmentally destructive operation” and “the dirtiest oil” on earth. The campaign will undoubtedly spread to the continent, and the rest of the world.

There is a way to prevent this, though: we can head them off at the pass. We can clean up our act as quickly as we can, cut our carbon emissions, increase our energy efficiency, and move on a large scale to renewable energy (which makes just as much economic sense as environmental sense: the tar sands won’t last forever).

And with all the resources, energy and wealth at our disposal, and with such a diverse, well-educated and (in many respects) liberal, tolerant and politically enlightened population, we actually have a greater capacity than any other nation to invest in a massive conversion to a sustainable and clean economy.

We have every reason to do so—and absolutely no excuse not to.

Zoe Cormier is a freelance environmental reporter from Toronto now based in London, England, and the former author of The Green Report: a regular column on environmental affairs in the Globe and Mail. Her first-person account of her evolution as an environmental correspondent, published in This Magazine in 2008 will be featured in a textbook for children forthcoming in 2010.

Alan Mathison Turing, computing pioneer and forgotten gay icon.

Alan Turing, pioneer of the digital computer, codebreaking war hero, and godfather of geeks everywhere, got a posthumous apology yesterday — many years overdue — from the British government. Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a statement acknowledging the government’s “appalling” treatment of Turing when it tried and convicted him of “gross indecency” based on his sexuality, and sentenced him to chemical castration in 1952.

The apology came after more than 30,000 Britons signed an online petition asking the government to apologize for this injustice.

The statement reads, in part:

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. […]

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.