Speaking out: Namu Ponnambalam outside the Canada Kanthaswamy Temple, a Hindu temple in the east end of Toronto,which has been taken over by the Tamil Tigers. Ponnambalam has been verbally harassed but never physically harmed for his criticism of the Tigers

From the window of the airplane I can see treetops for miles and miles, with terracotta-tiled roofs flickering in patches. Then, on the one-hour bus ride from the airport, I catch glimpses of yellowthroated birds and wildflowers in the bushes. Small white herons with jet-black legs and beaks dot the paddy fields. Trees rise up out of lagoons. Everything is lush and green on the northern peninsula of Sri Lanka, with little islands trickling into the Indian Ocean. It’s December 2003, the middle of the rainy season, and I’ve returned to my homeland for the second time in 29 years. In the neighbourhoods of Jaffna town, the coconut, neem, tamarind and banana trees shade the front yards of elegant old homes. Back in 1973, when I was three years old, I used to stand on my aunt’s porch filling up on mango slices. Black crows would swoop down and snatch them out of my hand.

Thirty years later, the country and its citizens are full of heartbreak from the barbarity of torture, assassinations, aerial bombardment and violent reprisal after violent reprisal — all because of a twisted, crippling civil war. Many of the old homes have been demolished by aerial bombs, some with just the foundation left, the jungle growing over the ruins. The conflict is being fought between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), or Tamil Tigers, a guerilla organization that has claimed sole representation of the Tamil people, and the government of Sri Lanka, which has discriminated against Tamils like me for decades. The Sinhalese majority, mostly Buddhist, dominates the culture and politics of the island. The Tamil minority is largely Hindu. Since the civil war began 23 years ago, more than 65,000 Sri Lankans have died, and many have fled to Canada.

Unfortunately, the brutality of the island’s ethnic strife has come here with them.

It is Valentine’s Day 1993, and Tamil journalist D. B. S. Jeyaraj, who has both supported the Tigers and criticized them, and his new bride exit a local movie theatre. They stroll through the parking lot after seeing a Sinhala film. Three friends walk ahead to give the newlyweds some privacy; no one has any reason to be afraid. Then two young Tamil men approach Jeyaraj. They ask if he is the editor of the newspaper Senthamarai, and if he had written a story against the Tamil Tigers.

“Yes, I got the information and wrote it,” replies Jeyaraj.

“That’s against our leadership,” says one man.

“This is not the place to talk about it,” says Jeyaraj. “Why don’t you call me tomorrow?”

“No, no, give us an answer here,” insists the other.

In the shadows Jeyaraj can see two other men, brandishing baseball bats and metal rods. The sight paralyzes him. His mind spins. His first instinct is to protect his wife, but he can’t decide how best to do it: fight or run? He puts his arm around her, then pushes her away as he walks, shouting to his friends, “Where is the car?”

One friend yells in Tamil for the men to back off. They don’t. They walk intently toward Jeyaraj and begin to batter him with their bats and rods, breaking his leg and inflicting significant head injuries.

Undaunted, Jeyaraj continues to write for and edit Senthamarai, a Toronto weekly, which he had been doing since 1990. Four months after the attack, a still not intimidated Jeyaraj starts his own publication, Muncharie. Two years later, more violence: Tamil gangs go after shopkeepers who sell his paper — one is beaten; another’s van is burned. Advertisers, distributors and newspaper carriers are threatened, leading to the closure of Muncharie in 1996. The abusive phone calls and death threats from Tiger sympathizers, however, keep coming. As a result, Jeyaraj seldom answers his phone.

But he did agree to talk to me. I wanted to investigate the little-known world of what some call the ethnic press. I wanted to discover more about how journalists in a country as diverse as Canada cover the tensions and fears that are exported with newcomers from such places as Sri Lanka, which, appallingly, has devolved from paradise to hell in my lifetime. And I wanted to meet some of the journalists in the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora who, by deciding to stand up to the Tigers in order to decrease their influence in my community, are doing what journalists everywhere are supposed to do: investigate, dissent, be a catalyst for change and support democratic free speech.

Worldwide, the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora numbers more than 800,000, with close to 250,000 living in Canada, and approximately 200,000 residing in Greater Toronto. A map of the world may show orderly and controlled political boundaries, but there are invisible lines demarcating guerrilla territories and trade routes for weapons, with money moving from Toronto to Sri Lanka. This intricate web of alliances speaks volumes about the impact the Canadian diaspora has on politics there. The Toronto community is a captive audience for Tiger propaganda and a critical fundraising base in the fight for a Tamil homeland.

The catalyst for the war came in 1983, when an estimated 3,000 Tamils were butchered, torched or beaten to death at the hands of Sinhalese mobs all over the country. The riots occurred after the Tigers killed 13 soldiers in Jaffna. But it is the strength, influence and ferocity of the Tigers that has forced the Sri Lankan government to take seriously Tamil charges of state discrimination and oppression.

In April 2006 Ottawa labelled the Tigers a terrorist organization, making it illegal for Canadians to join or support the LTTE. Prior to this ban, Tigers and their sympathizers were able to systematically invade the public sphere of local Hindu temples, media outlets and businesses such as the ones that dot the landscape of Scarborough in Toronto’s east end.

Among the myriad Tamil travel agencies, insurance companies, lawyers, grocery stores, restaurants and bakeries is Spiceland Super Market on Sheppard Avenue. Its metal shelves overflow with Tamil groceries: mango jam, uppama mix, lentils, sesame oil, dried chilies, shark meat, whole coconuts and pumpkin. For sale at the long checkout counter, pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses: Lord Ganesh, Sarasvathy and Lakshmi. Until a year ago, next to the Hindu gods were DVDs featuring another kind of deity: Velupillai Prabhakaran, leader of the Tamil Tigers.

Farther west on Sheppard is Babu, a popular take-out joint. The fast-food outlet thrives with men and women lined up to buy hoppers, fish cutlets, kothu roti and mutton rolls. The aroma of spices and steam rising from curried dishes fills the air. Amidst the usual bustle, though, is one detail the non-Sri Lankan might miss: an outdoor sign that states: “For Taste and Flavour of Thamil Eelam.” In northern Sri Lanka, Tamil Eelam is the de facto state the Tigers rule. When the ban took effect, LTTE flags disappeared from Tamil stores.

This Scarborough neighbourhood is also home to D.B.S. Jeyaraj, who left Sri Lanka in 1988 after being threatened by the government for being sympathetic to the Tigers. Jeyaraj spent a year at Harvard University as a Neiman Fellow in journalism before coming to Canada in 1989.

I meet him on a lazy, hot, July afternoon in 2006 at a Coffee Time outlet in a local mall. We talk for three hours. For someone who has endured such a brutal beating, there is a softness to him I do not expect. I also don’t anticipate his intense emotional attachment to Tamil nationalism, which he describes as “reactive, not proactive. If the Sinhala majority had not tried to thrust certain things down, Tamils would have been very docile.” He says he’d always planned to return to his homeland, and at the end of the Neiman Fellowship he contacted the editor of a Sri Lankan paper he had worked for. “We have enough corpses here,” the editor told him. “We don’t want another one. Don’t come now.”

Starting Muncharie after the beating was his way to respond to the Tamil community’s need to know what was happening in Sri Lanka — many who came to Canada after 1983 spoke only Tamil. “Since I was supportive of the Tamil struggle, there were many articles I wrote that would have been interpreted as pro- LTTE,” he says. “I was sympathetic to the LTTE, but not with these fellows,” distinguishing between Tiger leadership in Toronto and Sri Lanka. But in 1995, Jeyaraj criticized the Tigers in Sri Lanka for breaking away from peace talks, saying so openly on Tamil Osai (Sound), a local radio station. “That created pandemonium within Tamil circles here,” he says. His friends in the World Tamil Movement, a Tiger front, were upset with him, yet he still wanted to publish his radio talk in Muncharie. His friends suggested he had better print a softer version, advice he ultimately rejected. “Something snapped,” he explains. “I said this, this is what I feel. Why should I cut it?” The article was one of many critiques Jeyaraj penned. Among them: describing the Tigers as a “neofascist intolerant organization claiming to fight for the Tamil cause”; writing about the murderous expulsion of Muslims from northern Sri Lanka; and criticizing their tactics of child recruitment and suicide bombers.

Over coffee Jeyaraj also talks about the solitude that comes with speak-your-mind journalism. “It’s a long, hard, narrow journey,” he says. “At the end of it, all you have are your very close relatives and a few close friends.” Criticizing the Tigers certainly has cost him friendships. On many occasions people he knows turn and walk in another direction when they see him. “Within the Tamil diaspora, the powers that be are the LTTE,” he says. That’s because in 1986 the LTTE began eliminating other militant Tamil factions that had also formed to stand up to the Sinhala state. They massacred Tamils who did not support them, emerging as sole representatives of the Tamils. There was no one else for the diaspora to support, and if they tried to, the kind of intimidation Jeyaraj experienced would follow. As a result, most Tamil-language papers in Canada ignore the diversity of Tamils and the pluralistic views of the diaspora.

Jeyaraj goes on to tell me about the current fighting in northeast Sri Lanka. “You cannot underestimate the impact of the Mahinda Rajapakse phenomenon on the Tamils,” he says, referring to the hard-line tactics of Sri Lankan President Rajapakse against Tamil civilians, who are suffering because of the bloody fight between the government and the equally hard-line Tigers. Jeyaraj openly admits to being unsure of how to respond, of what to write. He describes the mental agony of going against the Tigers: “Am I doing wrong? Okay, they may have made a mistake in intimidating me, but I’ll be doing something wrong if I go against them. After all, they’re fighting for us.” As I listen, he looks up, often, wary of any Tamils wandering into the coffee shop. At one point, a young Sri Lankan man sits at the next table. Jeyaraj stops talking and suggests we grab a bite to eat in the food court, where he continues to criticize the Tigers.

In 2000, he tells me, Anton Balasingham, right-hand man of Tiger leader Prabhakaran, called Jeyaraj from London. He told Jeyaraj that he had come to accept some of his criticisms. Now, said Balasingham, he wanted Jeyaraj’s help in steering the Tiger organization away from the hardliners. Jeyaraj agreed to assist, and began writing articles demanding the Sri Lankan government negotiate with the Tigers.

“As a human being,” Jeyaraj explains as we sit at an isolated table in the food court, “I felt flattered that, after all these attacks on me, they were now coming to me for some kind of help.” Balasingham was convincing, he says, sympathetic to the recent deaths of Jeyaraj’s parents, but also emotionally manipulative. According to Jeyaraj, Balasingham said, “Our people need peace in a settlement. Help me to fight the demons within the movement, and I will slowly persuade Mr. Prabhakaran.” For the first time, the Tamil Guardian, a Tiger paper published in the U.K., reproduced Jeyaraj’s articles critical of the government. But by 2002 Balasingham no longer accepted phone calls from him and Jeyaraj finally realized he had been seduced and co-opted. “I’ve now lost all faith in the LTTE,” he tells me. “The brief period that I thought the LTTE was capable of transforming and coming into the peace process is gone. The justice of the Tamil cause is being diluted, undermined and distorted because of LTTE methods.”

Our conversation over, we leave the mall together. I had no way of knowing it would be our last meeting. Since then he has been elusive, at first responding to my emails and calls, agreeing to interviews, then cancelling. Then nothing.

When I think back on our conversations, I remain puzzled by his murkiness. He seems to make a distinction between the Tigers and their methods. It is as though he sees the Tigers as a delinquent band of brothers-in-arms who have the right idea — Tamil nationalism — but the wrong plan of attack. In December 2006 the man who told me he had “lost all faith in the LTTE” wrote articles that betrayed a tacit respect and admiration for the Tigers’s military prowess. And when Balasingham died the same month, he wrote articles glorifying the man’s intellect and life’s work, even though he was a diplomatic face who provided theoretical justification for murder. I have no sympathies with the Tigers, a view that came across in the questions I asked Jeyaraj at the mall. After returning home, he must have decided he wanted no more part of an article written by someone who wasn’t as torn as he was.

Jeyaraj is emblematic of the complexity of the Tamil diaspora. It is impossible to say how many Tamils in Toronto truly support the Tigers. Some will do so just to be safe, only expressing their contempt in private. But the general impression is that the majority of the diaspora supports the Tigers, if not financially, then emotionally. A generation of older Tamils, who immigrated to Canada prior to 1983, remembers the Sri Lankan government’s discrimination and violence against Tamils, and blindly supports the Tiger cause. Other Tamils, who left Jaffna after experiencing both the fascism of the Tigers and the aerial bombardment of the state, have a more complex understanding of Tamil rights. George Ckrhushchev, a Tamil journalist who immigrated in 1986 and founded the paper Thayagam, is one.

It is late September and Ckrhushchev proudly shows me the fruit trees — apple, persimmon, Asian pear, grape and peach — scattered throughout his Scarborough backyard. As we get comfortable, he shows me back issues of Thayagam. He hasn’t looked at them in 10 years. He quietly, thoughtfully turns the pages, reading his prose. The paper was printed in different colours — pink, red and yellow — and sold for 75 cents at grocery stores. He wrote editorials about intimidation in the diaspora, and the time the Tigers set fire to the Tamil Resource Centre in downtown Toronto. He also wrote about his friend, Sabalingam Sabaratnam, who, while living in Paris in the 1990s, was writing a book critical of the Tigers. In 1994 the Tigers shot Sabaratnam, execution-style, in front of his wife and son.

Ckrhushchev is irate that the terror he thought he had left behind has followed him to Canada. “We come here and we’re still afraid of them,” he says. “That’s not good.” Taken aback by the propaganda in the few Tamil-language newspapers in Toronto, he started his own tabloid, even though he had no journalistic experience. “Normally I’m a shy person who never gets into trouble,” he later wrote to me in an email. “But when somebody takes me for an idiot, I get angry. When I read the Tigers’s war literature, I could see how we are collectively fooled.”

One of the groups Ckrhushchev opposes — the publishers and editors of pro-Tiger media — knows there’s a price to pay for writing critically about the Tigers. Even if they don’t agree with the ideology, the group supports the Tigers in order to keep advertisers and stave off the kind of harassment that forced Jeyaraj to fold Muncharie. Ckrhushchev says, “I don’t think people will be standing up and saying, ‘Okay, I want to write the truth.’”

Living in a downtown Toronto apartment building at Wellesley and Parliament in 1989, Ckrhushchev worked alone and walked around with his backpack, distributing copies of Thayagam to the few Tamil shops that existed at the time. He collected stories from writers in Europe and Sri Lanka, and penned editorials. In Thayagam’s first issue, Ckrhushchev wrote about the murder of Appapillai Amirthalingam, secretary general of the Tamil United Liberation Front. Ckrhushchev says it was an “open secret” that the Tigers were responsible. According to Ckrhushchev, the Tigers later admitted it officially.

As they did with Jeyaraj, Tiger sympathizers began calling Ckrhushchev after the article was published. “I didn’t like their intimidating tone,” he says, showing his quiet tenacity and defiance. “They cannot question my right to publish.” At one point, in October 2006, he wrote a savagely mocking column under a pseudonym that translates to “One Who Will Not Easily Obey.”

Harassment can come officially from the Tigers, or a Tiger sympathizer. At one point Ckrhushchev kept track of the phone threats in a journal. “I never take it seriously because they can’t do anything here,” he says. “All they can do is beat me up when I go distribute the papers.” Ckrhushchev hasn’t been touched, but a cousin who helped with distribution was once followed by a Tiger supporter to a nearby subway station, where he was assaulted and robbed of money and leftover copies of Thayagam.

Another time, Ckrhushchev and a friend were threatened in Toronto’s St. Jamestown. The two, who had just left the Tamil Resource Centre, were followed, surrounded and menaced by about a dozen people. “Why do you write?” they demanded. Ckrhushchev was told there was an order from the “top” and that his paper was now banned. His response: “If you don’t like what I write, you can write to me and I will publish it, but I’m not going to stop writing.”

Following that incident, Tiger sympathizers went to Tamil shops and told owners not to sell Thayagam. Many capitulated, but now that the paper is online the Tigers can’t gain anything by harassing distributors. They can’t hassle advertisers either — Ckrhushchev doesn’t have any. He funds Thayagam online himself through his work in the film industry.

Ckrhushchev’s mission is to show how the pro-Tiger press obscures the truth. He achieves this, according to one friend, with his “devastating sense of humour.” In that 2006 column under the pseudonym, for example, he wrote about gratuitous killings committed during the Sri Lankan ceasefire. He said that the Tigers simply would not stop killing; that the leadership didn’t want them to lose their desire to kill, so they dusted off a list of traitors from old, opposing Tamil political factions. According to Ckrhushchev, the Tigers didn’t want the international community to know this, and so the term “unidentified gunmen” began appearing in the Tiger press. For people in the diaspora, it was a coded message: “Unidentified gunmen” meant the Tigers did the killing; it also identified the victim as a traitor.

Ckrhushchev is particularly keen on showing how the Tiger press bombards its readers with a potent message: the Tamils are victims. The currency of war for the Tigers is the suffering of Tamils. Riots against Tamils occurred between 1956 and 1983. Stories of Sinhalese mobs butchering Tamils, burning Tamil homes and businesses, raping women and burning others alive have been repeated as a mantra. But at the time of the 1983 riots, many Sinhalese actually protected their Tamil neighbours. Today, there are Sinhalese and Tamil human rights activists working together in Sri Lanka.

But these stories don’t serve the Tigers’s agenda. One typical example, an editorial in the December 2006 issue of Oru Paper, a bimonthly published in English and Tamil, discussed Rajapakse’s election in 2005 on the strength of widespread support from hardliners in the southern part of the island. It failed to mention that election monitors reported that road blocks comprised of burning tires had been set up to prevent travel to polling stations in the north and east, ensuring the president’s victory. In the northern town of Jaffna, turnout was just 0.014 per cent of more than 700,000 registered voters. The Tigers then stepped up military and civilian attacks in a push toward war. “If you call Jaffna, everybody will say they can’t stand [the Tigers],” says Ckrhushchev. “Even of the last war, people are openly saying we still don’t know why the Tigers started it. Here, the Tamil newspapers will write that the Jaffna people are ready to fight. It’s a feel-good thing.”

In 1994, Namu Ponnambalam agreed to edit articles for a new local Tamil monthly, Serendeepam, which ran stories in both English and Tamil. He was almost 30 and it was a volunteer job. Because the publisher included pro-Tiger articles, Ponnambalam worked for him on the condition that he could express his personal views on the political situation in Sri Lanka. For the first issue, he produced an article that criticized the Tiger leadership for demanding that the then newly elected President Chandrika Kumaratunga solve the civil strife within nine days. Ponnambalam made a simple point: that it was ridiculous to expect an incoming president to solve such a sensitive issue in so short a time. After the paper hit the streets, the publisher received several phone calls at home. The first caller said, “If you don’t support the Tamil leadership, we won’t support you.” Another said, “You’re a traitor to the Tamil cause.” In a subsequent article, Ponnambalam printed a few of the comments, including names of callers.

Soon after, Ponnambalam’s wife received a phone call. The Tamil-speaking man said to tell her husband to stop writing. The cold fear on his wife’s face told him the whole message when he went home. His pro-Tiger cousins also asked him to stop. His publisher asked him to stop writing critically of the Tigers. He refused. The paper died after the second issue.

In 2004, Ponnambalam received death threats after attending a Human Rights Watch (HRW) meeting on the Tigers’s recruitment of child soldiers. “We’re looking at you,” said one caller. “We’ll take your life away.” His wife received another call: “Dear sister, you have nice lovely young kids. I don’t think you want to live like a widow in the future. Look after your husband.”

I meet Ponnambalam in January 2006 on a bitter, cold day in a deserted Scarborough doughnut store. Soft-spoken and baby-faced, he works as a pharmacy technician and freelance immigration interpreter to support his wife and three young daughters. He leaves his cellphone on so his wife can reach him — she’ll call four times during the interview to make sure he’s okay.

Ponnambalam tells me about the day he was riding in the car with a friend, listening to a political talk show on CTBC, a local Tamil radio station. He called in and, once on-air, delivered an extemporaneous 10- minute lecture. “I identified myself,” he says. “No point in hiding it because everybody knows the voice.” He acknowledges the many Tiger supporters in Canada, but goes on to say that none support the cause to the extent that they will urge their children to become suicide bombers or fighters. His wife now refuses to keep a radio at home because she knows he won’t be able to resist tuning into Tamil talk. “I’m enjoying this opportunity to tell you the truth,” he says. “Because as one person, if I could shake the whole organization in Canada… I love this.”

His father was a leftist politician in Sri Lanka, so activism is in his blood. If he doesn’t try to change things, he says, “I become a walking body; that’s it. Just work nine to five, pay off your debts, maybe go to the local Indian cinema and take your kids to Florida. At the end of 65 or 75 years, you look back on your life, what you’re going to see is your beautiful house paid off.”

Like Ckrhushchev, Ponnambalam is fearless in his passion for critiquing the Tigers and their cause. He has been quoted in mainstream media without anonymity, as he did following the March 15, 2006 release of an HRW report titled, “Funding the ‘Final War’: LTTE Intimidation and Extortion in the Tamil Diaspora.” Ponnambalam was quoted in the report and interviewed by the Toronto Star, as well as by CBC and CTV. After the CBC interview he and his wife barely spoke for three days. But despite — or perhaps because of — his high profile in mainstream Canadian media, he hasn’t been harassed by the Tigers since.

When I see Ponnambalam again in September 2006, he tells me he hopes to start his own paper, something he’s wanted to do for years. His vision: to focus on a broader concept of the Tamil community, covering social issues, business, arts and politics. He labels most of what’s currently available a “Tamil ghetto” run by publishers and editors who only read Tamil-language news and don’t access other news sources, like the HRW report.

Neither do their readers. Many Tamils, after arriving in Toronto speaking only their native language, find jobs for low wages. They gravitate to the free Tamil weeklies. “They’re more into negative propaganda [against the Sri Lankan government] than taking a positive attitude toward a peace settlement,” Ponnambalam says. Manipulation of the diaspora is key to funding the war machine, which in turn supports Tamil Eelam, Prabhakaran’s empire. The existence of Tamil Eelam ensures that he need not worry about defeat in a democracy. In fact, the Tamil papers reinforce this as they vie for approval from the “Supremo.” As our meeting winds down, Ponnambalam concludes with insight: “We’re rewriting our own history through the news media.”

On my second day back in Jaffna in 2003, I make a trip to the LTTE cemetery. The graves are arranged according to year, from 1983 on. Destroyed by the Sri Lankan army in 1996, the cemetery was recently rebuilt, according to my rickshaw driver, a former Tiger cadre. Landscaped with shrubs planted in rows and stone pathways to walk upon, it is orderly and meticulously kept, and still looks brand new. Three men stand ankle deep in ochre-coloured earth, digging up and turning over soil in a field extending from the burial ground. I wander around, in between the graves, until satisfied I’ve seen as many of the 2,000 tombstones as I need to. I can’t read the Tamil inscriptions. I try to photograph the scene, but my camera jams. Like much of what actually happens in Sri Lanka, it is a picture that will not be seen in Canada.