08/21/2010
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The Ottawa Citizen
Mohan Samarasinghe worries the Sri Lankan Canadian community is divided on status of refugees from the MV Sun Sea.
08/17/2010
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Channel News Asia
VANCOUVER, Canada : Canadian authorities are investigating whether Sri Lankan rebels financed the passage of some 500 Tamil refugees to Canada last week, officials said before the start of detention hearings.
08/15/2010
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The Province
Members of the Tamil community are meeting in Burnaby on Sunday to discuss the plight of 450 illegal migrants who arrived in Canada on Friday.
08/15/2010
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National Post (Canada)
VICTORIA — A day after Canadian officials said the migrants who travelled from Thailand to British Columbia aboard a cargo ship had arrived in surprisingly good health, a report has surfaced that one man may have died during the journey.
08/15/2010
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The Star
EDITORIAL: Canada doesn’t have a Tamil “problem,” whatever critics of our refugee system may say about the arrival here of the cargo freighter MV Sun Sea with some 500 asylum-seekers. We processed 34,000 refugee claims last year; these arrivals won’t overtax the system.
08/14/2010
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Vancouver Sun
From the Komagata Maru carrying 376 Punjabi passengers and the SS St. Louis travelling with 900 Jewish asylum seekers, to the boats with 600 people from China's Fujian province and the Ocean Lady that docked in B.C. last year with Tamil refugees - there is something about boatloads of migrants that triggers a national hysteria. Perhaps it is the realization that the expanse of ocean is not enough to enforce the divide between the West and the so-called Third World.
08/14/2010
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The Island
Amidst the devastation and indiscriminate violence, the decades of war were also marred by targeted political killings. Here, many remember August 12th as the anniversary of two prominent figures assassinated by the LTTE; Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar in 2005 and Tamil democracy activist Kethesh Loganathan in 2006. Lakshman during much of his engaged political life was at the helm of Government as Foreign Minister. Kethesh on the other hand, had a diverse past; as militant, journalist, NGO researcher and finally as an official in the Government Peace Secretariat. In thinking about the current political conjuncture, on the challenges of engaging state policies and state reform, I want to return to the politics of Kethesh, who was my mentor and my friend. Over the decades, I have relied on many Tamil activists to understand the challenges of Tamil politics and Tamil dissent. However, when it came to thinking through the questions of Tamil democracy, of transforming militant and militarised politics into the realm of social justice and democratisation, of drawing from displacement and exile into engaging the political process and changing our political culture, Kethesh was the formidable intellectual influence.
08/14/2010
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The Island
Last week I highlighted three episodes as evidence of the dystopian state of Sri Lankan politics. There are many more but one in particular deserves dishonourable mention: the KP interviews. The serialized media interviews of T.S. Pathmanathan (KP) should raise the concern whether Tamil politics in Sri Lanka is being reduced to the status of serial stories published in Tamil Nadu magazines like Kalki, Kumudham and Ananda Vihadan. All three were staple reading among Sri Lankan Tamil middle class families in better times. In hard times now, people have no time for stories but story telling is becoming the pastime in Tamil politics.
08/14/2010
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SOS Children's Villages Canada
14/8/2010 - At least 30 and as many as 50 of the 490 Tamil refugees arriving in Vancouver yesterday are children.
08/13/2010
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The Globe and Mail
As it grapples with screening nearly 500 illegal migrants intercepted off the B.C. coast, the Canadian government is operating on the assumption that two more shiploads of potential asylum seekers are preparing to sail here from Southeast Asia.