posted July 17, 2000 10:56 AM            

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

John Hryniuk for The New York Times
Tamils at a recent rally in Toronto celebrated the exploits of Sri Lanka's secessionist Tamil guerrillas and their leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related Articles
• A Wary India Prepares to Step Back Into Sri Lanka's War (May 25, 2000)
• Sri Lanka Rejects Offer of Cease-Fire by Rebels (May 9, 2000)
• Crisis Grips Sri Lanka as Guerrillas Gain in North (May 4, 2000)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ORONTO -- At Queens Park, a swath of green in front of the legislative building downtown, thousands gathered one recent Saturday for a festive celebration. A band played. Children danced. Volunteers bearing cardboard piggy banks trolled the crowd for donations. Wads of cash were enthusiastically stuffed inside.
But these were no ordinary festivities. The revelers had come to celebrate the latest "victory" of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the guerrillas embroiled in one of the world's bloodiest secessionist wars, in Sri Lanka.

A colossal effigy of the cherub-faced guerrilla leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, stood on the stage. Videos of the rebels' latest exploits were on sale. And, of greatest concern to the Sri Lankan government, the donations collected here by Canadian Tamils, it is believed, would ultimately find their way to support the Tamil insurrection.

Fund-raising for the Tigers is illegal in the United States. But Canada has no such prohibition, and Canadian intelligence officials and Sri Lankan diplomats say it has become an increasingly important source of support for the Tigers, who are seeking to carve a Tamil homeland out of Sri Lanka, an island nation off the southern tip of India.

Since it began in 1983, the war has claimed 62,000 lives and displaced a million people, including the 150,000 or so Tamil refugees who have poured into this city, making it home to the largest concentration of Sri Lankan Tamils outside Sri Lanka.

So oceans away from the mass graves and suicide bombers that have become hallmarks of the civil war, the Tamils of Toronto hold pledge drives on Tamil radio, fill tills on shop counters, and solicit money door-to-door in Tamil neighborhoods and workplaces. Experts estimate they send anywhere from $7 million to $22 million a year in direct and indirect support for the guerrillas.

Among the many seemingly improbable champions of the guerrilla cause is Sitta Sittampalam, 66, a former schoolteacher with a patch of silver hair and a gold pen tucked smartly in his breast pocket.

What much of the world might consider terrorism, Mr. Sittampalam calls a liberation struggle for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority, which he says has suffered years of repression by the island's majority Sinhalese.

If that struggle results in "incidental" civilian deaths, said Mr. Sittampalam, who now heads a Tamil immigrant aid agency here, it is part of the regrettable but inevitable logic of war. He regards the Tigers' suicide bombers, known for blowing up politicians and civilians alike, to be "heroes" of the highest order; indeed, the Black Tigers, as they are called, are commemorated here every July.

"I do all that I can to support Prabhakaran, to see that this struggle matures to the stage where we have one free nation recognized in the international community," said Mr. Sittampalam, who like many overseas Tamils became politically active long after leaving Sri Lanka.

Like other Tiger supporters, he insists his money goes toward a charity that provides relief aid, though that too, relief workers say, is controlled by the Tigers.

"It was the efforts of the Jewish diaspora that made Israel a free country," Mr. Sittampalam said. "Why shouldn't Tamils do that?"

Fueled by the potent idea of a homeland, overseas Tamils have been vital to drumming up political and financial support for the separatist cause -- much like Jewish, Arab and Irish expatriates have for their own struggles. And while the Tigers certainly have other lucrative means of support, many scholars and Sri Lankan diplomats say the scope of the insurgency could not be sustained without expatriate aid.

Tamil nationalist fervor was on full display a few weeks ago, after the Tigers captured the strategic gateway to the northern Jaffna peninsula, a part of Sri Lanka that the Tamils would like to see as their own.

One Tamil radio station, announcing its pledges over the airwaves like a public radio fund-raising drive, took in more than $600,000, said Nehru Gunaratnam, a spokesman for the World Tamil Movement, the group that sponsored the rally in June and is effectively the political arm of the Tigers in Canada.

Meanwhile, pro-Tiger activists went door-to-door, coaxing regular donors to make special offerings. They appeared at the home of one such donor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of both Canadian law enforcement and World Tamil Movement organizers. He chatted with the solicitors over a cup of tea. They filled him in on the news from home, and left with $250. That was in addition to his regular $100 monthly contribution, deducted directly from his checking account.

No, he chuckled, he does not claim it on his tax returns. And no, he does not ask how the money is spent. He would feel guilty asking, he said.

"We are here, having a good job, eating well, having a car, going for parties," explained the man, who came here after a mob chased his family out of their home in Sri Lanka in 1983. "When we are living like this and giving a little money, to ask questions, it's not correct."

Such voluntary contributions make up the bulk of the money raised for the Tigers, law enforcement authorities and Tamil Canadians say. But sometimes, they say, a bit of polite coercion is used, and occasionally Tamil gang members are deployed against Tiger critics.

The police say proceeds from immigrant smuggling and heroin trafficking may also make their way into the Tiger treasury. In recent years, dozens of Tamil street-gang members have been convicted on immigration and drug charges.

"Some of them we believe may be giving money to the Tigers," said Sgt. Fred Bowen of the drug section of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. "Because it's not a criminal offense, we don't devote our resources there."

That may soon change. Canada does not keep a list of proscribed terrorist groups as the United States does. But it is a signatory to a recent United Nations convention that urges countries to monitor and ultimately freeze the collection or deposit of money that may be used to buy arms or support terrorists abroad.

Canadian lawmakers are currently considering how to amend their criminal code to comply with the convention.

Recently, Canada has also tried to deport known members of the Tigers, notably Manikavasagam Suresh, the former spokesman for the Federation of Associations of Canadian Tamils, an umbrella group that includes the World Tamil Movement, arguing that he posed a risk to national safety. The case of Mr. Suresh, a key fund-raiser, is being appealed before Canada's Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the charity that the World Tamil Movement says receives much of its money, the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization, is itself controlled by the Tigers, according to officials with several independent nongovernmental organizations in Sri Lanka. "To my mind, and to most people here, they are basically the development wing of the L.T.T.E.," said Simon Harris, acting country director for Oxfam in Sri Lanka, using the Tigers' initials.

By law, Americans cannot contribute to any group linked to organizations on the State Department's terrorist list, like the Tigers. But those links are not always clear.

Tamil-Americans can and do raise money for the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization, which is not on the State Department's list. The group has a fund-raiser scheduled for next Sunday in Edison, N.J.

Estimates of how much money leaves Canada in support of the Tamil cause vary widely. Peter Chalk, a researcher with the Washington office of the Rand Institute, offers a "very rough" estimate of about $600,000 to $1 million each month.

Rohan Gunaratna, a research associate at the Center for Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Edinburgh, says Canadians raise up to $22 million a year.

Some of it trickles out, Mr. Gunaratna contends, through a web of bank accounts that are used to procure arms. But much of it, he and others say, is dispatched through an informal, paperless money-lending system, through which money deposited at a Tamil shop in Toronto can end up halfway around the world in a matter of hours, leaving no record of the transaction.

For their part, those who take up the collection here, chiefly the World Tamil Movement, cannot, or will not, explain how the money they collect is transferred or spent.

"There are different avenues I can't talk about," Mr. Gunaratnam, the group's spokesman, said.

"Relief reaches there," he said simply. "It is distributed."

posted July 23, 2000 03:31 AM            

see if they feel so passionately about the LTTE if they have to go back and instead of cowardly donating dollars from behind a nameless border they could perhaps donate a son or a daughter to the cause ... see how much your love of the farty VP shines forth then ...