A Tragic Waste

But then whenever human beings conspire to incite violence on one another it is a monumental tragedy. In the case of huge numbers of people comprising a distinct ethnic, religious and social group within a specific geography, there is always a search for a place of their own, where they will feel themselves free from the tyranny of others who do not recognize them as equally entitled, and who prey on them as lesser peoples.

The Turks and the Greeks are forever at war with one another and Cypress is a good example of how unresponsive people can be to the need to respect one another equally. The Kurds live in areas controlled by Iraq, Iran and Turkey, with no homeland of their own, because of borders established by successfully powerful interests that excluded them from claiming a geographic homeland.

We see the same thing playing out in the Middle East where ancient Judea was historically demolished and its people sent into mass migration, while neighbouring tribes claimed the geography as their own. And where to the present day Arab countries remain adamant that they will not accept the presence of a renascent Jewish presence in the Middle East within a state of their own.

And there are the Tamils, who live in Sri Lanka and in India, who languish as second-class citizens, scorned by the majority Sri Lankan Muslim population as an inferior and dis-entitled group subservient to the majority. Rebellions break out everywhere in those areas of the world where tribal groups have been separated with the often-arbitrary selections of borders separating countries, leaving groups separated and adrift.

This is a common enough occurrence in Africa, where various African tribes battle one another for supremacy in a shared geography. The world witnessed the slaughter in Rwanda when the Hutu targeted the Tutsi population in a terrorizing initiative to slaughter an indigenous population. We see the same problem repeated in Democratic Republic of Congo with aggrieved brutalization of people reflecting the same tribal offences.

Canada has seen its share, at a remove, of its own citizens being involved in territorial disputes and racial-directed abuses. Canadian citizens suffered a terrorist atrocity in the bombing of Air India flight 182, killing hundreds of Indo-Canadians as a result of the political conflict between Indo-Canadian Sikhs and Hindus in the dispute for a region to be called Kalistan, a homeland for Sikhs, carved out of greater India.

Canada is also host to one of the greatest diaspora-numbers of Tamil Sri Lankans, among whom, like the Sikhs, support was given to a group whom much of the world - because of their extreme violence, exacted both against the Sri Lankan majority and the Tamils themselves - held them to be terrorists. Despite which, because of the despicable treatment of Sri Lankan Tamils by the government of Sri Lanka, many Tamils abroad supported and helped finance the Tamil Tigers.

Reading about Canadian-Sri Lankan-Tamil Surish Sriskandarajah, as an active supporter in helping to finance and arm and smuggle arms and finances to the Tamil Tigers one condemns the man. But the devil is always in the details, such as his having witnessed at first-hand the wretched living conditions of Tamils living in Sri Lanka, the withholding of necessities of life for them, and the dire conditions that led to violent confrontations.

One cannot but have some measure of compassion for this young man, a brilliant student and entrepreneur, a compassionate humanitarian who, because of his passion for justice, lost his way and now, though he has been a Canadian for much of his life, must face deportation to the country of his birth, which continues to persecute his people.

It is all a supremely tragic waste.