Sri Lanka's PTA

Asoka Weerasinghe Gloucester . Ontario . Canada

Dear Editor:

The Americans are being just Americans when they show their opposition to Sri Lanka’s Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). This is solely to prevent human rights abuse of Tamil minority, they say.

This is a pure bully boy tactic on a vulnerable little island which is coping with the assault on its sovereignty by a gang of terrorists the Tamil Tigers, initially trained by Indira Gandhi’s India, and now banned by the United States and 30 other countries including Canada. So what is their problem?

I suppose October 16, 1970 is too far gone and fuzzy for the Americans to recall their neighbour to the north, Canada, invoking the War Measures Act, suspending the civil liberties of all Canadians to deal with what was known as the FLQ (Front de liberation du Quebec) crisis. The FLQ was seeking a separate French Quebec, like the Tamil Tigers seeking a racist Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka.

The preamble of the War Measure Act stated:

“And whereas there is in contemporary Canadian society an element or group known as

Le Front de Liberation du Quebec who advocate and resort to the use of force and the commission of criminal offences including murder, threat of murder and kidnapping

as a means of or as an aid in accomplishing a governmental change within Canada and

whose activities have given rise to a state of apprehended insurrection within the

Province of Quebec.”

On the same date, the Canadian government passed the Public Order and Regulations Act of 1970 to assist the law enforcement agencies in the apprehension and conviction of those who would subvert the elected government and destroy their way of life. Did the Americans who seems to be so concerned about Sri Lanka’s possible human rights abuse with their PTA, address their concerns to the Canadians too? Of course, not. Perhaps, they realized that Canada was too big a country to handle and knowing that the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau wouldn’t roll over and play dead, and would ask the Americans to go fly a kite.

One might wonder whether the War Measures Act was invoked because 65,000 Canadians had been killed by the FLQ; that they had been detonating claymore mines to kill innocent civilians; because they assassinated 31 parliamentarians together with the Head of the State; that the FLQ had gunned and sunk several of the Canadian gunboats; or that their suicide bombers were targeting the top brass of the Canadian armed forces!.

Not at all! The hysteria was because the FLQ kidnapped and killed Quebec’s Minister of Labour and Immigration, Pierre Laporte, and kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner James Cross who survived two months as a hostage, which Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau cited in justifying his invoking the War Measures Act.

The FLQ by then had an armoury of a grand total of 33 fire arms and 21 other offensive weapons including 3 smoke grenades, 9 hand knives and 1 saber. Since 1963 the FLQ had been responsible for more than 200 acts of violence including bombings, which had killed seven people, and the Canadians wanted the assurance from the government that they will meet head-on this violent challenge to civil authority. With the War Measures Act in place Canada saw almost 500 suspected FLQ sympathizers rounded up and denied due process of law. That should have put the American neighbors backs up. There weren’t even a pip squeak from these bunch of American Goody-Two Shoes who are too quick out of the block to wag their fingers at Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapakse.

President Rajapakse’s reaction to the Americans should be the same as of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau who said to a media reporter, “Yes, well, there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don’t like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is go on and bleed.”

If there is anything that ought to come to light about the invoking the Canadian War Measures Act by Prime Minster Pierre Trudeau on October 16, 1970 is that, the measures taken by him were completely successful. From that time on, even the most extreme believers of Quebec independence abandoned violence as a way of achieving their ends, and resolved to go about democratically.

President Rajapakse should take a cue from Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and do what is best for his island nation and safeguard the sovereignty and the security of its peoples, and let the bleeding hearts bleed. He should be steely eyed and refuse to blink to the international pressures and the perceived threat to his island’s security. The national security should supersede the protection of civil liberties at this juncture of Eelam War IV which has turned moronic and ugly, or else he will see his island nation divide into two before long.