Thousands of Tamil supporters crowded Queen's Park in Toronto on May 18 to mark the one-year anniversary of the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka.Darren Calabrese
Tamils returned by the hundreds to the heart of Canada's largest city in a stark echo of demonstrations a year earlier, when Sri Lanka's war with the separatist Tamil Tigers ground to a brutal conclusion.
They converged on the Ontario legislature on Tuesday evening to remember family and friends killed in the conflict, but this time, Toronto's Tamils - the largest such group in the world outside Asia - came with more than flags and placards.
They came armed with a new report, by a group led by Canadian jurist Louise Arbour, that reiterated a point they made loudly to no effect during last year's protests: that the Sri Lankan government deliberately killed thousands of civilians in the war's final months.
Of course, the report from Ms. Arbour's International Crisis Group also accused the Tigers - whose emblem Tamil-Canadians flew again on flags at Tuesday's demonstration - of war crimes every bit as heinous.
Ms. Arbour has urged a United Nations-backed war-crimes investigation to get to the bottom of what happened as the 26-year conflict wound down, and said Canada should press the Sri Lankan government to comply at the threat of sanctions. The former chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals in the Balkans and Rwanda told The Globe and Mail that Sri Lanka's future peace demands a full accounting of alleged atrocities on both sides.
Laudable as that sounds, another Canadian expert warned that a war-crimes investigation now is premature and could deepen the rift between Sri Lankans and the Tamil minority, thus prolonging Canada's role as a platform for Tamil grievance.
"In an ideal world it would be a fine thing to do," Wesley Wark, a University of Toronto professor who studies contemporary security issues, said of a war-crimes probe. "But in the real world, I'm not sure it would have the consequences that anybody would hope for."
The Sri Lankan government, which celebrated its victory over the Tigers on its anniversary Monday, has yet to respond to the report, but has in the past flatly denied killing civilians. The regime's unflinching defence of its counterinsurgency and its disdain for international scrutiny makes an outside probe all the more appropriate, the report argues.
Righteous as that sounds, Prof. Wark warned the effort could devolve, as it did when the UN looked into alleged Israeli crimes in Gaza, "into a political fight and an exchange of mutual, propagandistic views, with the truth getting more obscured at the end of the day."
Canada, he said, should use quiet diplomacy with Sri Lanka over the next few years, during which stories of atrocities will no doubt surface to a point where they can no longer be ignored.
"The Sri Lankan government is not going to be able to put a lid on this; ultimately these stories are going to come out," Prof. Wark said. "But the work is going to have to be done from within, and it's only going to be successful if it's done in a changing kind of political environment in Sri Lanka itself."