posted November 28, 2001 02:16 PM            

For two years, the community has held its Maaveerar Naazh - or Martyrs Day - ceremony at Exhibition Place, an event that attracted more than 5,000 to honour their dead.

But this year's event was cancelled because Toronto police refused to provide paid-duty police detail, a requirement in the event licence.

"They didn't give us any particular reason," Dianne Young, general manager of Exhibition Place, said last night. "The police had done it in the past."

The cancellation took place just two weeks ago, leaving event organizers scrambling to find space at other locations throughout the city.

At a banquet hall near Markham Rd. and Sheppard Ave. last night, people were both sombre and angry.

"It has done a lot of damage to the morale of the community," said Priya Balakrishnan, 23, a University of Toronto student. "It's a slap in the face that we have had to separate to different places on this important day."

Police spokesperson Sergeant Jim Muscat said he didn't know why paid-duty officers were refused. He said each division's unit commander makes such decisions. The Star tried to contact the superintendent in charge of 14 Division last night, but he was unavailable for comment.

Some community members said Martyrs Day is like Remembrance Day in Canada. "How would you feel if you weren't allowed to hold a ceremony to remember Canadian soldiers who died?" asked 28-year-old Abi Singham.

Feelings were so heated that Guna Vera, a volunteer with the World Tamil Movement, said legal action might be launched against the police.

At the banquet hall last night, about 400 people listened to speaker after speaker talk about the struggle for independence and the importance of supporting the cause. To the left of the stage, lit by dozens of candles, was a long passageway featuring photographs of the dead - "heroes" as they were called - some of them "freedom fighters," some civilians.

Some were in fatigues, holding automatic weapons.

These men fought with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, considered broadly to be a terrorist group. Indeed, the Tigers have used terrorist tactics such as suicide bombings to commit assassinations.

The Tigers have been fighting since 1983 to divide the nation along ethnic lines and bring the Tamil minority a separate homeland. The 18-year conflict has ravaged the poor island nation's economy and claimed the lives of more than 64,000 people.

Most of Sri Lanka's 3.2 million Tamils - a minority in the Southeast Asian nation - live in its northern stretches.

Tamils accuse the majority Sinhalese, who control the government and military, of widespread discrimination.

Balakrishnan, a member of the College and University Tamil Students' Union, said her uncle was recently killed in her homeland. She invoked the axiom: "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

Harini Sivalingam, 22, also a union member, said participants support the Tiger movement because "it means we have a right to determine our own destiny and we don't have to live with human rights violations."

Councillor Mario Silva, chair of the board of governors of Exhibition Place, said the terrorist issue played no role in the decision to cancel the event.

"The Tamil community is a very decent and hard-working community," he said. "I'd be shocked and horrified if there was any of that taking place."

Still, in Ottawa last week, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board told a student group affiliated with the World Tamil Movement that it couldn't rent school space for its remembrance ceremony. The board had received a letter from the High Commission of Sri Lanka outlining the movement's ties to terrorism.

posted November 28, 2001 03:31 PM         

Stewart Bell
National Post
TORONTO - An ethnic organization that has received millions of dollars from
the
federal government despite allegations it is a front for a South Asian
terrorist
group has been warned its taxpayer funding may soon be cut.

A Citizenship and Immigration Canada spokeswoman said yesterday the department
had decided not to renew funding agreements with the Tamil Eelam Society of
Canada, which provides services for Sri Lankan migrants.

"Basically, our recommendation is not to renew them because they are not
meeting
our requirements," said Simone MacAndrew, a CIC spokeswoman in Ottawa. She
would
not specify what requirements and contracts she was referring to or their
value.

She also did not say whether the move was related to the flurry of
anti-terrorism measures being introduced since the Sept. 11 attacks. The
funding
recommendation must still go before a review panel, Ms. MacAndrew said.

A report by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service names the Tamil Eelam
Society as one of eight non-profit organizations that have served as Canadian
fronts for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Canada designated the Tigers as a terrorist organization under federal
financing
regulations on Nov. 7. Government officials accuse the Tigers of
assassinations,
suicide bombings, ethnic cleansing, torture and rape.

The society receives about $2-million a year from the immigration service to
provide language and other settlement services to Tamil migrants, but its
leadership is openly sympathetic to the Tamil Tigers.

"We do support the LTTE," Sita Sittampalam, the society president, said in an
Australian television documentary broadcast last year. "We support it as a
means
of getting our rights and our right to self-determination -- we support the
LTTE."

An RCMP intelligence report claims a Tamil Eelam Society leader arranged for a
European LTTE representative -- an assassin known as Shukla -- to visit Canada
in 1998 to broker a peace deal between rival Tamil gangs. The truce quickly
collapsed.

The Tamil Eelam Society is a member of the Federation of Associations of
Canadian Tamils (FACT), an umbrella group that is also alleged by CSIS to be a
front for the Tigers. Cabinet ministers Paul Martin and Maria Minna were
widely
criticized for attending a FACT dinner last year.

The FACT president and the Tamil Eelam Society president were until recently
the
same person. The society has ties to other Tamil Canadian groups as well.

The CSIS report says the society has shared addresses in the past with not
only
FACT, but also the World Tamil Movement (WTM), which a Federal Court judge has
described as the Canadian arm of the Tamil Tigers. It has also shared an
address
with the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization (TRO).

The TRO and WTM are both considered by CSIS to be actively engaged in
fundraising for the Tamil Tigers guerrilla war effort in Sri Lanka. The money
they raise in Canada is shipped to the LTTE's chief weapons purchaser in
Thailand, CSIS claims.

The society has been audited several times by Immigration, but no major
problems
were uncovered. Recently, however, Tamil community members have complained
about
the group's alleged affiliation with the violent Tamil separatist movement.

Mr. Sittampalam said yesterday he was not aware of any decision to cut
funding."Is that so? I don't know, we have not been contacted yet," he said.
"It
surprises me because we had discussions with them some time back and they did
tell us that one or two classes are being pruned, that's what we were told,
but
we were not told any more than that."