View of Ceylon now

The Tamil Boat Peoplee

August 28, 2010, 6:05 pm



Rajan Philips







There is no need to retell the story of the 492 Tamils who landed on the west coast of Canada earlier this month after sailing from far away Thailand. Mark MacKinnon of the Globe and Mail, in Canada, has written a very detailed account of the planning and execution of this oceanic operation. The official and unofficial receptions given to the boat people in Canada have been well reported. Indeed, the story has been covered from different angles: the nature of the operation (human smuggling and LTTE regrouping); political causes in Sri Lanka (postwar insecurity of the Tamils, government’s tardiness in addressing resettlement issues); motivation of the boat people (economic migrants, victims of violent alienation); and the potential for more Tamil boat people to undertake similar risky voyages.



MacKinnon’s narrative traces the steps leading to what he calls the "impossible voyage of a Tamil ghost ship" – from the purchase of a rickety old Thai vessel that was "barely seaworthy" and never meant to carry more than 15 to 20 people overnight; renaming it Sun Sea from what used to be Harin Panich; floating the vessel in international waters between Thailand and Vietnam – to avoid seizure by either country, and using small fishing boats to ferry the passengers from the shore for boarding; and finally starting the long journey from near Thailand to Canada’s west coast. The organizers, according to MacKinnon, were always "a step ahead … keeping their operation quiet and covering their tracks". Making money may have been the primary motivation but to what end is the subject of speculation.



The "impossible voyage" itself was irresponsible and dangerous and it would be even more irresponsible and dangerous for any vulture to undertake a similar operation in the future. What of the people who chose to board the vessel in mid-ocean and sail for days and nights on end? Their plight and their decision need more understanding than criticism. Yet it has to be said that their decision to embark on this journey illustrates an incapacity for risk assessment, and I can only describe it as a feature of pre-industrial culture.



In fairness to them, it has to be added that during the war years – with the exception of the ceasefire period – modes of travel between Jaffna and Colombo became worse than what was possible before the British connected the two places by rail and road. So people took weeks on end to make the journey – starting with the long wait to get a spot on the boat, sail from Jaffna to Trinco for days, and finally the last leg by overland to Colombo through myriads of checkpoints and harassment. People have become physically and psychologically drained and therefore ready to do anything to get out of the hellhole of war through whatever means. And they paid dearly for their voyage. Not everyone could have paid the phenomenal fares upfront and many of them could well be bonded to their agents for the rest of their lives.



Tamil migration in perspective



Tamils are not the first boat people in recent times but hardly any Sri Lankan would have thought fifty years ago whezn the Vietnamese boat people were in the news, that people from Sri Lanka would be taking to the sea as a desperate mode of migration. During colonial times no Sri Lankans were taken out of the country to toil in the colonial coffee and tea plantations. In contrast, Tamils from poverty and famine stricken South Indian villages were brought to Sri Lanka just for that toil. In fact, South Indian Tamils were taken throughout the far flung British plantation empire – extending from the Fiji island, through Africa, to the West Indies. Subramania Bharathy, the greatest twentieth century Tamil poet, wrote a long poem on the plight and travails of the migrant Indian Tamil workers – pleading with fate to tell him what it had planned to do with them.



Fate, to borrow the poet’s license, did not play such nasty traicks on the Sri Lankan Tamils, at least during colonial times. If at all it pampered them when it came to migration. Jaffna Tamils with rudimentary English were taken as colonial functionaries by the British to Malaya and Burma. In both places, they scrupulously kept themselves apart from the Indian Tamil ‘coolies’. Even in Sri Lanka, coexistence of the Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims were far more cordial, despite the political rhetoric, during colonial times than it has been after independence.



Decolonization has been especially harsh on Sri Lanka, but the blame for that should be laid not at anyone outside Sri Lanka but on the political class within Sri Lanka. The political man’s vileness has finally caught up with the island though not for the same proselytizing reasons that Bishop Reginald Heber would have had on his mind when he wrote his Icy Mountains hymn including this famous stanza:



"What though the spicy breezes
Blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle,
Though every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile."



The harshness of decolonization is the continuing disintegration of the political society of the old colonies and the outmigration of the former colonial subjects to the old colonial centres. It will not be an exaggeration to say that Sri Lanka has lost more people since independence to outmigration on a per capita basis than other former British colonies. Not only Tamils, but many Sinhalese and Muslims have been leaving Sri Lanka for good reason, bad reason and for no reason. It might have been poetic justice when most of them landed in Britain, as they once did, but now they are targeting other English speaking countries such as the US, Australia and Canada – all three are immigrant societies that are more open with opportunities than traditional settled societies.



Of all the main Sri Lankan Diaspora centres, Canada looms large in the Sri Lankan political eye as the home of the largest Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora. The Tamils are established enough in Canada that in the eyes of a Canadian journalist (Anthony Reinhart of the Globe and Mail) there were two Canadas scrambling to respond to the arrival of Sun Sea – Official Canada and Tamil Canada ("an obscure but rozzzzzzbust public within a public … a parallel society built over decades …"). Needless to say, Tamil Canada has earned special notoriety in Official Sri Lanka as the hotbed of LTTE support and funding.



How did Canada, with no colonial (only Commonwealth) connection to Sri Lanka and geographically and culturally as distant from Sri Lanka as any two countries can be, become the home for the largest Tamil Diaspora – is a pertinent question and the answer to which has everything to do with Sri Lankan politics and nothing to do with Canadian society. There have been benignly individual ties from Canada to Sri Lanka in the past. Rev. Charles Mathews, a Canadian of Irish origin born in Ottawa, became a Catholic priest of the Oblate order and spent his missionary life in Sri Lanka, serving for nearly two decades (1930s and 1940s) as the Rector of St. Patrick’s College, Jaffna.



An equally illustrious connection is that of Dr. Mary Rutnam, the Canadian pioneer for women’s rights in Sri Lanka. Mary Rutnam was born Mary Irwin in the small town of Elora, in Ontario, not far from where I live. The Rutnam name is part of the medical, municipal and social histories of Colombo and the specific contributions of Mary are well captured in Kumari Jayawardena’s biographical sketch of the Canadian pioneer. The third connection I know is that of Evan Hardy, the great founder of the Hardy Technical Institute in Amparai during the heady days of Gal Oya in the 1950s. Prof. Hardy was of American origin but an alumnus of the University of Saskatchewan, the prairie province of agrarian socialism in Canada.



All three connections involved pioneers who sacrificed their lives for initiatives that have served Sri Lankans well over time, but only their shells remain with little spirit and even less resources. Those pioneers would have never imagined that Sri Lanka despite all the promises they saw in it would deteriorate to such an extent and that its people would leave for Canada in large numbers and through desperate means.



Even politically, Sri Lanka after independence held out a promise of stability. Pierre Trudeau, French Canadian and later one of Canada’s more famous Prime Ministers, writing as a young intellectual against the conflation of nation and sovereignty, pointed to the "State of Ceylon" as an example of a viable polity comprised of "three ethnic groups and four nations."



"It is not the concept of nation that is retrograde; it is the idea that the nation must necessarily be sovereign", wrote Trudeau in the same essay. As Prime Minister, he turned Canada into a living example of that principle – democratically defeating separatism among his French Canadian compatriots and constitutionally transforming Canada into a federal matrix of linguistic equality, regional autonomy and cultural diversity. Sri Lanka, on the other hand, negated its own promise which had impressed others –by insisting on exclusive sovereignty and fighting over still more exclusive self-determination. The fallouts from that

RESUMING AFTER AN YEAR

An year has passed since I took up my pen.In between so much has happened! My beloved Ceylon has steadily progressed towards political suicide like Weimar Republic of Germany. After all the millions of words of advice history etc,march of the destruction is going on

I wish to do my mite to preserve history for the sake of future generations and I intend to continue now

Thanks