Foreign Affairs Committee on March 30th, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Good afternoon.

This is meeting number 12 of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, on Monday, March 30, 2009. We will continue with our hearings on the situation in Sri Lanka.

In our first hour we have Mr. Bruce Matthews, professor emeritus at Acadia University, and also Mr. David Cameron, professor of political science at the University of Toronto. We welcome you here today, and we thank you for coming to Ottawa and to our committee to testify.

As you know, our committee provides an opportunity for each witness to give an opening statement of approximately 10 minutes. Then we will go into our first round of questioning.

Perhaps, Mr. Cameron, we will begin with you. Thank you for being here.

[Professor David R. Cameron, Chair, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I appreciate the invitation to appear before you to discuss Sri Lanka.

I'm sure many of your witnesses have spoken to you about the large number of Sri Lankan citizens who are suffering and are in terrible danger as we speak, caught between the LTTE and government forces in the conflict zone in Mullaitivu.

Rather than speaking further about this and running the risk of repeating what others have said, I thought it might be of more use to the committee if I were to talk a bit about the longer-term challenges in Sri Lanka--on the reasonable assumption that the Tigers will soon be conclusively defeated on the battlefield--what might happen, what should happen after the conflict is over, and what useful role Canada might play in these circumstances.

Let me begin by briefly describing my experience with Sri Lanka and providing a bit of background for my thoughts on the future. I went to Sri Lanka in the spring of 2002, just a few months after the ceasefire agreement was signed between the then-UNP government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE. As the two parties began their peace talks, many people believed that turning Sri Lanka into a federation might contribute to the achievement of a stable and just peace by giving the Tamil community in the north a degree of self-determination within a united Sri Lanka.

I sit on the board of the Forum of Federations, an international network of federal countries founded by Canada in the late 1990s. Under its auspices, Bob Rae and I--Mr. Rae was not then in politics--went to Sri Lanka many times to offer support and advice to both the government and the Tigers, and to mount educational and training sessions for civil society groups.

We met regularly with G.L. Peiris, the government minister responsible for leading the talks, as well as with other government officials and party leaders, and with the Tiger leadership--Anton Balasingham, S.P. Thamilchelvan, V. Muralitharan, known by his nom de guerre, Colonel Karuna--in Killinochi and elsewhere.

Mr. Balasingham, suffering from ill health, died in December of 2006. Mr. Thamilchelvan was killed near Killinochi in a targeted government air raid in the autumn of 2007. And Colonel Karuna, the LTTE's top military commander in the east, split from the Tigers in 2004, fracturing their unity and greatly weakening the LTTE position and its clout. He is now Minister of National Integration and Reconciliation in the current government of Sri Lanka.

Mr. Rae and I attended four of the six rounds of peace talks, the last of which was held in Japan in 2003, and we continued with missions to Sri Lanka for some time after that. I've not been back to Sri Lanka for several years, but I follow events there closely.

Little progress was made during the peace process, and I believe the talks fizzled because neither side was prepared to make the painful compromises that would have been necessary to achieve a just settlement and to set the country on a new course.

The Tigers showed little disposition to accepting the realities of democratic government in a free society. They continued to smuggle arms, abduct civilians from military service, and murder political competitors and government officials. The government, for its part, seemed incapable of capitalizing on the opportunity it had created, of driving the negotiation process forward, of persuading the majority Sinhalese community that significant change was going to be a necessary but worthwhile price for a stable peace.

The current government, headed by President Mahinda Rajapaksa, has been skeptical of the peace process from day one and takes the view that military force is the only way of dealing with the LTTE and ending the conflict. Aided by the split between the LTTE and Colonel Karuna's faction in the east, plus the demise of several of the Tigers' top leadership, the government has been winning on the battlefield and is within an ace of conclusively defeating the Tigers.

Unquestionably, this is a considerable achievement after 25 years of civil war, but success brings its own challenges and concerns. The battlefield defeat of the LTTE may not put an end to the acts of terrorism that have blighted many parts of the island.

These may prove very difficult to suppress. On the evidence of the March 10 bomb blast at a mosque south of Colombo, which killed 14 people and wounded 46, the Tigers, even if they are in their death throes, have not lost their capacity to commit awful acts of terrorism.

What is more, the battlefield defeat of the LTTE may be regarded by many Sri Lankans, and possibly by the government, as the end of the road and a conclusion of the process rather than the start of a new and equally important process of national reconciliation. Having won the war, will the government be able and willing to make the peace? The prospects are far from promising. There is little in Sri Lanka's history, and not much in the composition and leadership of the current government, to encourage optimism. Several Sri Lankan governments in the past have been given an opportunity to bind up the wounds of division. None has show much determination or taste for it. The present government is heavily reliant on Sinhalese nationalist support. What lessons are the nationalists likely to draw from the pending historic victory? They have always believed that Sri Lanka is for the Sinhalese. Defeating the Tigers will just confirm it.

To be sure, President Rajapaksa has spoken of social justice and of the need to heal the wounds of war. In a speech on February 4 he declared that it is the task of the entire nation to extend to “the people of the north...the kindness, friendship and prosperity they deserve”. The president urges his fellow Sri Lankans to act “with the dignity of a citizen who equally loves the Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim, Burgher, Malay, and all others who make up our nation”, yet he is committed to the “unitary nature of the state”--and there's the rub. If the nation is composed of all these communities, why is there so little concrete expression of that fact in the affairs of state?

For a great many of the president's supporters, Sir Lanka is not a multicultural society but a single Sinhalese nation with several small minority groups. Government documents are typically issued only in Sinhalese. There are few Tamil-speaking officials. There are repeated reports of racial profiling by the predominantly Sinhalese police force. These realities will be damnably difficult to change because they emanate from a spiritual and ideological source. The rock of identity for a large proportion of Sri Lankan Sinhalese is the conviction that their society is unitary, not plural, and even 25 years of civil war seem not to have changed that. Indeed, for many of these Sri Lankans the battlefield victory will be a triumphant confirmation of that fact.

Appropriate action at war's end depends on a recognition of the justice of the claims, not of the LTTE but of the Tamil and Muslim minorities. After all, you have to acknowledge that something is broken before you can try to fix it. One might hope that the defeat of the LTTE would allow Sri Lanka to tackle its deep ethnic divisions and begin the hard task of delivering a measure of justice to its Tamil and Muslim minorities.

Alas, I fear that is unlikely to happen, in part because it would involve profound and extensive reform of the Sri Lankan political order and also because it would entail an assault on the cherished identity and self-perception of the majority.

In these circumstances, what might Canada do to support reconciliation and reconstruction in post-conflict Sri Lanka? The first thing I think is for Canada and Canadians to be realistic about their potential influence. The Sri Lankan government is suspicious of foreign intervention and generally believes I think that much of what the international community has tried to do has in fact been unhelpful to the government and its central goals. Therefore, the space for creative international involvement post-conflict may be more limited than one would like.

Clearly, the very large Sir Lankan diaspora community in Canada is a highly significant potential resource to assist in the reconstruction and development of the war-ravaged regions of the country, particularly in the north. It is hard to imagine that Sri Lankan Canadians, most of them Tamils, will have much interest in returning to Sri Lanka or investing in its development if the island remains dominated by a Sinhalese majority flushed with the sense of victory over the LTTE.

In the earlier round of talks, as I have said, there was a genuine interest in exploring the devolution of political power, including federal models as a way of accommodating Tamil aspirations for self-rule. It seems to me to be unlikely in the extreme that President Rajapaksa's government will have any interest in following this course of action. International policy support in aid of this goal, therefore, is likely to be unwanted.

In the light of this bleak analysis, what are we left with? Economic development is one thing, as well as assistance in repairing and improving the social and economic infrastructure that has been neglected or ravaged by war, especially in the north and the east of the country. That's desperately needed and is probably something the government would be glad to have help with.

Just as important, but more problematic in its reception, would be governance support. Sri Lanka would not win any prizes for good governance. Freedom House designates it as only partially free, and the country ranks 92nd in Transparency International's 2008 corruption perception index, below Serbia, Senegal, Panama, and Madagascar.

Better government would benefit all Sri Lankans, whether they be Sinhalese, Muslim, or Tamil. Assuming they were welcomed by the government, programs to help Sri Lanka move in this direction would be very worthwhile.

Finally, given that the significant decentralization of power is not in the cards, programs that help the Sri Lankan government and its citizens to accommodate and develop respect for the cultural, religious, and linguistic pluralism that is embedded in their society would make a real contribution to the post-conflict world Sri Lanka is about to enter.

In this area, clearly Canada has a lot to offer. The question here, as elsewhere, though, is whether Sri Lanka wants to buy what Canada has to sell. These are all good ideas, I think, but if there is no market for them in the concrete reality of post-civil-war Sri Lanka, it's difficult to imagine they will have much bite or impact.

I have to say I feel badly about offering this gloomy assessment of the situation in Sri Lanka, but that's the way I see it. I'd be delighted to be proven wrong, but I greatly fear that's not likely to occur.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Cameron.

We'll move to Mr. Matthews.

[Professor Bruce Matthews, Professor Emeritus, Acadia University]

Like Professor Cameron, I want to thank the committee for inviting me to come to speak to you about Sri Lanka.

I'll give you a little bit of background. I went to graduate school there in 1970 as a Commonwealth fellow in Buddhist civilizations. In 1971, while I was still a student in Peradeniya, the first Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna insurrection broke out, caught me completely off guard, and basically turned my focus from Buddhist studies to contemporary sociological and political studies. I've ended up in that field over the last three decades and have written fairly extensively on it. I have also visited the country on a regular basis, most recently as a Canadian member of the International Independent Group of Eminent Persons, which met in Sri Lanka, basically, between January 2007 and April 2008. It was 14 months. I was there six times with that particular body, which, by the way, ended up as a failed initiative.

So that's part of my background. Let me look at my text, which I sent in. You may or may not have it in front of you, but I will use it as a sort of blueprint for where I want to go.

I was impressed by the magnitude of the recent demonstrations by aggrieved Ceylon Tamils in Toronto earlier this month. They were aimed, of course, in part, at raising Canadian public awareness of the Tamil predicament in the north of Sri Lanka, where, as we all know, there are many thousands of Tamil civilians trapped in a tightening military showdown between the army of the state and the LTTE. Those demonstrations, of course, were also a cry to the Canadian government and the international community. They were an urgent request to somehow become involved in providing those civilians safe conduct, and, by extension, to further the life of the LTTE as a possible political answer to Tamil demands for autonomy, if not outright sovereignty.

It's quite clear that the war is no longer insulated from the rest of the world, nor has it been for some time. The eyes of the world are focused on Sri Lanka. Accusations are being made by the international community that can't be brushed aside. In the short term, I don't think there's too much the international community can do, but there will of course be some observations I will want to add to Professor Cameron's about what Canada might get itself involved with, however indirectly.

Direct involvement in the Sri Lankan scenario by Canada or any other government is, arguably, not going to happen, despite our international consternation over the many abuses this civil war has provoked. Unless both sides of this conflict can come to some agreement about involving an outside agent to assist in mediation, which is unlikely, Sri Lanka, I would argue, needs to bring its civil war to a conclusion by itself. The limits of international engagement in situations in which human rights are in question is a pressing topic in many places. Sri Lanka is an urgent example of a country in need of mending its miserable record and poor global image on this matter.

None of this is sufficient to precipitate outside involvement in Sri Lanka's terrible predicament. It's not as if the international community hasn't tried to assist in an equitable end to this war. Professor Cameron has just mentioned the Forum of Federations, which did outstanding work there.

We could add to this that Nordic countries, in particular, gave leadership and support to two recent attempts. Norway facilitated peace talks in 2001, directly leading to a welcome ceasefire that lasted six years, although its third-party role was severely criticized by nationalists as being partial to the LTTE and by peace activists as not being stern enough.

A second venture, the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission, originally composed of representatives of five Nordic countries, left Sri Lanka in January 2008, just before the last day of the six-year ceasefire agreement. Hence, I think this small but well-organized observer body did key, creditable work over a period of nearly a decade in the border areas between the warring parties. But they got little thanks for it.

A third attempt to reach out to Sri Lanka was through the Independent International Group of Eminent Persons, which in 2007 was invited by the Government of Sri Lanka to observe and monitor the deliberations of a presidential commission on human rights abuses. I will refer to it by its acronym, IIGEP, of which I was the Canadian representative. I resigned after 14 months in April of last year, having concluded that our advice was not welcome and was indeed ignored by the state. It's too bad that none of these initiatives succeeded. In 2005-06, the Aceh Monitoring Mission in Indonesia in 2005-06 produced very credible results, but this has seldom been the case in Sri Lanka.

Although the conflict is clearly one between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils, it is also much more than a simple ethnic dualism—a dualism sometimes referred to as the primordial ethnic struggle, the ethnic struggle between the monolithic aggressor and the monolithic victim. That it is not. The tragedy of Sri Lanka has been shaped by historical, territorial, and socio-economic forces, including colonialism, party politics, caste issues, and religion. Religion has been swept into the drama through a revival of Buddhist nationalism. This is compounded by Sri Lanka's lack of mature democratization. Since independence in 1948, democracy and the rule of law have never been a part of the intellectual focus. Both sides of the conflict continue to experience acute frustration.

The Government of Sri Lanka faces a severe security threat, which in principle it has a legitimate right to address. This was expressed last year by Yasantha Kodagoda, Sri Lanka's Deputy Attorney General at the Human Rights Council, Geneva, when he argued: “Mr. President, at a time when Sri Lanka's very existence as a unitary sovereign state is being seriously threatened by ruthless and dangerous terror, what, in fact, would you suggest the Sir Lankan government do other than exercise legitimate military action?”

I argue that this was and is a valid question. The state argues that the current civil war is justified because the LTTE is not prepared to seriously enter into negotiations, which they are not. The LTTE claims, with some good reason, that no credible political solution has been forthcoming from the state. There is not much Sinhalese public demand for military de-escalation as a means to obtain a cooperative response from the LTTE, and the war has no end in sight. Even if the LTTE collapses as a ground force, armed cadres will carry on asymmetric action for decades. I project 20 more years at least.

This is central to the tragedy. All non-militant policies have been subverted by extremist Sinhalese nationalism and the systematic elimination, over the last 25 years, of moderate politicians, both Sinhalese and Tamil, by the LTTE. Both ethnic communities have also faced decades of their own internal insurrections, sometimes based on caste and certainly on class struggles. This has hardened hearts to now commonplace violations and atrocities. In addition, the civil war has pressed both sides of the conflict into ideological and tactical corners, which continue to severely constrain human rights on both sides of Sri Lanka's conflict.

The international community needs to criticize this human rights abuse and offer assistance when it can. For instance, there was the Tokyo Donors Conference in 2003, and there may be a chance that it will be kick-started back into some kind of performance. But it would not be prudent, in my opinion, for the Government of Canada to become actively involved in allowing the LTTE to gain time and hope for their secessionist cause.

I'll end by raising just a few points that I think could be useful in pressing in the Canadian context. Some of these actually come from a humanitarian body in Sri Lanka that is made up largely of religious leaders, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, for that matter, and I think their list of observations is pertinent to what we might also reach out to.

First, continue steady food supplies through the World Food Programme as long as is necessary.

Second, continue the ferrying of the sick and injured persons through the ICRC to hospitals that are in a position to provide the necessary personnel and medicines to treat these people.

Third, negotiate and evacuate all civilians who wish to leave the conflict zone. For this purpose, a temporary so-called humanitarian pause, rather than a ceasefire, might be negotiated to enable that evacuation.

Fourth, I would also argue that the international community, certainly here in Canada, could engage in a dialogue with the LTTE branches abroad and in that way possibly bring forward some ideas from the Tamil community right here in Canada about what they might see as the possibility of a future without the LTTE, at least in its present form.

I have some other notes here, Mr. Chairman, about confidence-building measures in Sri Lanka and the lack of them, but I think I would leave that until a possible discussion brings them up.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Matthews.

We'll move into the first round.

Mr. Rae.

[Bob Rae, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

I'll share my time with my colleagues.

Just briefly, thank you both, Dr. Cameron and Dr. Matthews. I won't ask a question to Dr. Cameron because I feel I know him too well.

I would like particularly to ask Dr. Matthews if he could tell us a little bit more about his experience on IIGEP, because I think it might be beneficial for members to understand what that process was and what happened as a result of it.

[Prof. Bruce Matthews]

Thank you, Mr. Rae. I'd be glad to do so, in a sort of encapsulated form.

The Government of Sri Lanka invited IIGEP to come to Sri Lanka. It wasn't imposed on them. By the way, I'll say right now, in case I forget to say it later, that I think this is the last time any international body will be invited by the Government of Sri Lanka, at least under the Rajapaksa government.

That's because we did our work quite thoroughly, and it was found to be too hard for the government to swallow--what we were offering in terms of what we felt our mandate was. The mandate was to observe a committee struck in Sri Lanka of Sri Lankans, including three Sinhalese, two Ceylon Moors, and two Ceylon Tamils. So it was a multicultural panel. Many of them were lawyers. They were all distinguished people. They were all hard-working and certainly they were all honest. But they had a limited budget and they were very carefully controlled by the Attorney General's office.

The Attorney General in Sri Lanka should not have been a part of the commission of inquiry's work, which had, as its mandate, to find out why 16 particular atrocities had occurred. The commission of inquiry should have asked the question of the whole apparatus or system of state. What is it that failed in the state, its police, and its judiciary? Why did the police and judiciary fail in not being able to solve these human rights atrocities or abuses initially? And why have they been lingering in the background for three or four years and still haven't been solved?

Instead, that commission of inquiry got itself bogged down in trying to establish an initial prospect on all of these cases, not questioning why the system failed, but going back to square one and interviewing all the so-called witnesses from the original atrocities. This took endless time. Everything was done in English and had to be translated into Sinhala. I was the only person in the IIGEP who could speak Sinhala. So it was necessary to do this and make it available in English, yet that added 30% to our time. So the sessions became extremely tedious, and furthermore, they weren't going anywhere.

We would periodically give our advice. Every six weeks we would offer our advice to the commission of inquiry and we had two weeks in which they could respond. After they responded, we published our observations and they were in the press, and they were not always complimentary.

Some of these so-called atrocities involved just a single person, for instance, the assassination of Foreign Minister Kadirgamar. Some of them were huge cases, like the death of 137 sailors who were blown up at a bus stop near Dambulla.

But the one that was particularly poignant to us was the assassination of 17 aid workers for Action Contre la Faim, a French NGO that was working in the Muslim village of Muttur, south of Trincomalee. Bernard Kouchner, the now current foreign minister for France, was on IIGEP at that time. He really wanted to press that, so we pressed it. We found that this took 6 months of our 14 months, and still it was not a case that came anywhere near being solved, even though it was quite self-evident that it had been perpetrated by the forces of the state.

After a while it became quite clear that the directives to the commission of inquiry were coming from the Attorney General's office, or even higher. They became quite insulting to P. N. Bhagwati, who was the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India and who was the chair of IIGEP. He basically said that if this didn't improve, we should resign, so we did. We resigned after 14 months.

I don't say it's a failure, just like I don't think the Forum of Federations initiative was a failure. I think we added something to it.

[Bob Rae, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

I like to think that it wasn't.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Matthews.

Mr. Patry, very quickly.

[Bernard Patry, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Merci beaucoup.. Thank you very much. Yes, very quickly; short questions.

The first one is this. It seems that the LTTE will be defeated; it's just a question of time. Do you feel that there's any chance of special autonomy for the Tamil community after the defeat of the LTTE? Is there any chance for autonomy, not sovereignty, or is it finished for all time?

My second question is for Mr. Matthews. You mentioned the complex historical, territorial, and socio-economic forces. You talked about the revival of Buddhism and nationalism. Do you feel that, between the Buddhists and the Hindus, there are any leaders on either side who could help solve that problem? It seems they're quite apart.

Thank you.

[Prof. David R. Cameron]

I think, realistically, there's no chance of serious decentralization. I guess the test case will be what happens with respect to the 13th amendment, which is a constitutional amendment creating provincial councils that has never been fully implemented. It's been on the books for a very long time. There's some talk and action that's being taken in a very limited degree.

The resistance to seriously contemplating the dispersion of the power of the state on the part of the Sinhalese majority—and the government tends to be composed of heavy representation from them—is so fierce that I think the closest Sri Lanka came to that was when it actually had, for a brief period of time, a significantly powerful interlocutor on the other side of the table, the LTTE, during the peace talks. Now you have nobody on the other side of the table. In fact, once they're defeated, there is no table. In that context, the notion that there will be significant decentralization of the power of the state is not in the cards.

[Bernard Patry, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

And about religion?

[Prof. Bruce Matthews]

Buddhism is involved on the Sinhala side as part of the nationalist identity. Hinduism is not involved on the LTTE side. In fact, many of the LTTE, if they embrace any religion at all, are Roman Catholics. If it is described as a kind of religious war, if you want to put it that way, it would have to be a very loose description, and it could only pertain to the hard right-wing Sinhala nationalists who wish to bring that dimension into it. To some degree, the Jathika Hela Urumaya and other Desha Premi groups, nationalist groups, have done this over a period of 40 or 50 years.

I think it's more like Northern Ireland, where Catholicism and Protestantism were sucked into, basically, a political drama: on the coattails of a political situation, religion came to have a role to play in it, tragically. We certainly all know that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope—nobody would ever have agreed to a religious war in Ireland, but it was done anyway. That's the way I would look at it, sir.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Matthews.

We'll move to Monsieur Dorion.

Mr. Dorion, for seven minutes.

[Jean Dorion, Bloc, Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC]

Thank you.

My question is for Mr. Cameron and Mr. Matthews. The impression that people often has is that Tamils who have fled Sri Lanka and who now live abroad overwhelmingly support the Tigers. Is that also your impression?

[Prof. David R. Cameron]

I think the LTTE has been very powerful in organizing, providing leadership, and indeed putting political pressure on the Tamil diaspora around the world, and certainly in Canada, especially in Toronto.

I think the difficulty is that there has been no other political force around which Tamils could rally to try to achieve reforms or justice for the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka. That's partly due to the LTTE murdering their opponents and competitors. It was historically a very brutal movement. They have been very effective internationally in generating support, in pressuring people to provide support where they might not have done it spontaneously, in raising money for their movement.

You saw in the rally in Toronto the number of Tiger flags. There's a lot of sentiment in the rest of the world to that effect. One of the reasons for that is there has been no other alternative political formation around which Tamils seeking reforms could rally.

[Jean Dorion, Bloc, Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC]

Mr. Matthews.

[Dr. Bruce Matthews]

I hope you don't mind if I answer you in English.

In this instance, the LTTE, over a period of 25 years now, has systematically eradicated, eliminated, destroyed, or neutralized--whatever--any Tamil opposition. The long list of Sinhala and Tamil moderates who've been assassinated by the LTTE is very sad testimony to the rigour of the LTTE plan for the Tamil destiny. There is absolutely no wiggle room for anyone else.

That is certainly so in Canada. With all due respect to the Tamil community here, I don't know of any real way in which, even amongst themselves, they can discuss this issue of other possible political alternatives. There's only the one that is available to them, at least in the public domain. That's a great sadness, in my opinion.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Mr. Cameron.

[Prof. David R. Cameron]

If I could just make one further comment, I think the Tamils, not just in Sri Lanka but around the world, are on the cusp of a major challenge, because the LTTE, on all the evidence, will not be there for them or against them.

In the future, it won't be the significant factor that it has been, so there's a big, big question. In that context, how do people who care about their country and about the fate of Tamils in Sri Lanka organize, and what kind of force can be mounted to support those aspirations and interests? That's an enormous question that I think people are just going to have to face in the next several years.

[Jean Dorion, Bloc, Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC]

Mr. Cameron, you mentioned one Tiger leader, a Mr. Karuna Amman, who switched allegiances and is now a minister in the Sinhalese government. Do you think that his actions reflect his personal ambition or is this an indication that he truly embraces a different vision of the Tamils' future in Sri Lanka?

[Prof. David R. Cameron]

My impression is that there are a couple of factors. One, I think, is that there were tensions within the LTTE movement that people from the outside could not readily observe, tensions between the Tamils of Jaffna and the Tamils of the east. He was the commander of the forces of the east. I have no idea of what the details were, but I think the frustration developed to such an extent that he decided he would break with the LTTE. When he went, he took a lot of people with him.

Also, my understanding is that he was traditionally very much on the moderate wing of the LTTE, so I think there may have been some frustration on that score.

No doubt, since he has now entered the government and when the Karuna forces left they started working implicitly with the military, there is clearly personal ambition as well.

I would think that there are at least those three factors.

[Jean Dorion, Bloc, Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC]

It would appear that the Tigers especially loath Muslims and yet, Muslims are themselves Tamils. What is behind this loathing?

[Prof. David R. Cameron]

I might ask Dr. Matthews to respond to that, because I think he may have studied that a little more closely than I have.

[Prof. Bruce Matthews]

The Muslim community, which is at least one million strong, or maybe more, is all over the island, except in the north, where they were expelled by the LTTE in the early 1990s. They are very strong in the eastern province. They would make up about one-third of the population of the eastern province. In certain parts of the eastern province, like Ampara, they are so self-evidently the majority that they would actually like to have some autonomy themselves, not as a secessionist state but certainly as an identifiable province or constituency.

The Muslim community also very wisely entered into the mainline Sri Lankan political parties after independence. For 30 or 40 years they've gained a much more credible political position in Sri Lanka because they cooperated with the UNP and the SLFP, the two major parties. It's only in the last 15 or 20 years that they have started to split off and form their own political parties, like the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress. Even then, they tend to cooperate with the state. I would have to say that they are not in favour of the LTTE and would be delighted to see the end of them.