The Tamil Tigers can somehow afford a parallel government in northern Sri Lanka with a small navy, visa services and traffic tickets:
When you drive through the “border” post into their territory, you have to set your watch back half-an-hour to Tiger time…During a recent visit, as I drove down a quiet country road, a Tamil Tiger policeman took out his gun… we were hit - with a speeding fine. There aren’t many rebel groups that take traffic violations seriously.
… it is one of the absurdities of the situation in Sri Lanka that you can find yourself debating the finer points of highway etiquette with a group better known for its devastating use of suicide bombers. [Link]
That anecdote actually lays bare the real reason for speeding tickets in every government: revenues. The Tigers get some of theirs by extorting from a community which generally supports their politics. They track which auntie has given money and which hasn’t and send enforcers to their homes in Canada (thanks, Ananthan). It’s their equivalent of taxation:
They apologized when they came knocking on her door one night… the men came sometime before winter began last year, and they asked for a monthly donation of $50 for the “Tamil cause.”
After an exhausting hour of debate, the Sri Lankan-born woman relented and agreed to $30 a month. But when she stopped her payments three months later, the men came back. Now they demanded a one-time payment of $2,000. “They said if I give them the money this time, they’ll stop coming…”[At the LTTE checkpoint,] her luggage was checked and she was told to write down personal information, including her passport number, if she wanted to travel… into the Tamil Tiger heartland… to visit family…
After they stamped her Tiger papers in Kilinochchi, she says a man at the office talked to her about donations. He knew that she’d refused to donate in Vavuniya, so he told her that he’d sent her information to Canada and someone would be in touch with her after she returned.
That’s why she believes the men who came to her door last year were sent by the LTTE. “They know this information of how many times I refused to give them money and whom I refused,” she says. But she won’t go to the police because she fears for the life of her family both here and back home…
Although many Tamils in Canada support the LTTE, some require a little gentle encouragement:
Among the remaining 70 per cent, there’s widespread support for Tamil independence in Sri Lanka, and thus for the Tigers’ mission. But some within that majority can’t afford to donate to the cause, or are morally opposed to the Tigers’ violence. This is the group among whom LTTE intimidation — whether direct or through the Tigers’ fearsome reputation — opens wallets……. a Human Rights Watch report scheduled for release next month indicates that intimidation and extortion in Tamil communities in Toronto and London, England, are pervasive. “We have documented a few cases of more overt threats, but more commonly people just give without question because there is a culture of fear that has developed over time because of the knowledge of what the LTTE does in Sri Lanka, as well as incidents that have happened in the West…” [Link]
Basic facts about the Sri Lankan Tamils in Canada:
The Tamils are a fairly recent immigrant group in Canada. They started arriving in the early ’80s, after the 1983 anti-Tamil riots in Colombo… In 1999, 10 per cent of all refugee claimants in Canada were from Sri Lanka. Meanwhile, the Tamil diaspora in Canada has grown to 200,000, most of them located in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver. By some estimates, about 150,000 live in Toronto, and another 70,000 live in the Toronto suburbs, mostly in Scarborough. [Link]
There has been similar diasporic funding for the Khalistan movement in the ’80s (diasporas due to persecution, with plenty of voluntary donations), and Muslim charities which are fronts for terror groups (diasporas due to economics, with many donations arising from negligent oversight).
What I find interesting is that those extorted are being taxed under two regimes, once without representation. And a group which claims to defend minority rights has long since turned on its own.
