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Ottawa cozies up to Tamil militants
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/serv.../BNStory/Front/
Sri Lanka says Ottawa cozies up to militants
By COLIN FREEZE
From Friday's Globe and Mail
UPDATED AT 12:49 AM EST Friday, Jan 14, 2005
Colombo — A high-ranking Sri Lankan official warned yesterday that Ottawa has grown too cozy with supporters of Tamil militants and could cause “discontentment and disgruntlement” as Canada tries to get help to people in the northern part of the island country.
Immigration Minister Judy Sgro has said that Canadian visa officers could be sent to Tamil areas to find disaster victims with close relatives who want to immigrate to Canada if those people have difficulty getting to Colombo to file their applications.
But W.H. Wiswa Warnapala, the deputy foreign minister of Sri Lanka's Sinhalese-dominated parliament, said that would irritate his government, which waged a bloody, 20-year civil war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam until a ceasefire two years ago.
“Certainly, that will be interpreted as a special attempt to get to Tamil areas,” Mr. Warnapala said. “It could be controversial, in my view. It would lead to criticism, discontentment and disgruntlement by the Sinhalese majority.”
A spokeswoman for Ms. Sgro said last night that no one was being given special treatment and the suggestion that visa officers could travel north is just an attempt to ensure that everyone is processed fairly.
“Our goal is to give fair and equal service to all the individuals that we are trying to get in contact with and, for those who cannot get into our office, we will take whatever steps need to be [taken] provided there is no risk to our visa officers,” Sherri High said.
The government's aim, Ms. High said, is to ensure that the Sri Lankans who qualify to be expedited through Canada's immigration system are reunited with their families.
But Mr. Warnapala suggested that Tamils have already disproportionately taken “full advantage” of Canada's immigration system.
Protocol demands that he bite his tongue when Prime Minister Paul Martin visits Sri Lanka next week, he said. But, if asked, he will express his government's point of view that Tamils have been extended special preference because of “pressure groups associated with the LTTE operating in Canada, particularly in Toronto and Scarborough.”
The Sri Lankan government discourages foreign officials from going to Tamil-controlled areas, fearing it will lend legitimacy to Tamil claims for independence. Mr. Martin has said he will not travel to northern Sri Lanka, although he will meet Tamil representatives during his trip.
The Sri Lanka Daily News said that Mr. Martin's decision not to visit the north has “taught another lesson in international diplomacy to the LTTE.”
Mr. Warnapala said he is “very pleased” that Mr. Martin is coming, but that it is a good thing he is not going to the north.
Militant expatriate Tamils are aggressively lobbying Canadian officials, he said, and Ottawa should be careful not to interlope into divisive political issues at a delicate time.
Jim Karygiannis, a Liberal MP from Scarborough, is in the northern part of Sri Lanka on a self-directed mission to ensure that aid is being distributed there.
While not taking anyone to task in particular, Mr. Warnapala said it would be wrong for outsiders to become embroiled in the internal politics of his country. The two have made attempts to put aside their differences during the tsunami crisis.
“We don't want people to interfere and upset the balance we have created in the last 13 days. We don't want anybody to make political capital out of that,” he said.
Most of Canada's 200,000-plus Tamil population fled the war between the Sinhalese-dominated government forces and the LTTE. While the gunfire has stopped, deeply ingrained hostilities between the two sides remain and a public-relations battle has intensified since the giant waves wiped out much of the country's coastal areas two weeks ago.
Despite the overtures of co-operation, a battle has emerged over whether international aid funnelled through the Colombo is getting to Tamils in the north and east areas that bore the heaviest losses.
Groups in those regions insist that Colombo wants to wipe Tamils out, not help them; the government calls those accusations LTTE propaganda. Mr. Karygiannis said he has seen aid getting through.
“On the ground, what I've seen is the aid is coming,” Mr. Karygiannis said in a telephone interview yesterday, adding that, although he paid for the trip, he will discuss his findings with Mr. Martin. The Canadian High Commission in Colombo referred calls on the immigration issue to Citizenship and Immigration spokesman Enrico del Castello. He echoed Ms. High's assertions that visa officers “will not be sent to any area of Sri Lanka where there are serious concerns about their safety.”
But the ranks of Canadian visa officers in the country are being bolstered to deal with an anticipated surge in applications. One officer has flown in from New Delhi and two more have been sent from Beijing to help the four visa officers who work out of Colombo.
So far, the demand resulting from the tsunamis has not been huge, Mr. de Castello said. “Since the crisis, we have issued 42 visas.”
And, in the end, officers may not be needed to make a trip north. Mr. Karygiannis said that from what he's seeing, northern Tamils are “more than willing” to go to Colombo to have their immigration applications processed. He added that he was hurt by comments from Liberal MP David Kilgour that his visit was adding fuel to the fire of Sri Lankan politics.
With a report from Gloria Galloway
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