13

Floating to the Lure of the Promised Land
Tamil Refugees in Canada

CYRUS SUNDAR SINGH

In the belly of the cargo ship we held,

Our breath, our noses, and each other.

In the belly of the cargo ship.

A village born of need and circumstance,

Not earth nor roots where we used to stand.

On August 11, 2016, near a small fishing village in Newfoundland, four former Tamil Sri Lankan refugees—Baskaran, Shanmuga Paul, Siva, and Gandhi—climbed into an old, beached lifeboat and sat together. Overwhelmed by the moment, the four men broke down, cried, and comforted each other. The four were part of a group of 155 Tamil refugees who, in 1986, were set adrift in two lifeboats for days without food or water, desperately lost somewhere on the North Atlantic Ocean—no land, no help, no hope.¹ Gandhi recalled that “for three days, we had no water to drink, no food to eat, and we couldn’t move, so we just remained where we sat.” Miraculously, on the third day, they were rescued by a local fishing boat whose captain, Gus Dalton, spotted the lifeboats “about ten kilometres west of Saint Shott’s on the southern tip of the Avalon Peninsula.”²

Their story quickly became front-page news in Canada and around the world. That was the first time in recent memory that Canadians had come face to face with Tamils; men, women, and children who were harbingers of the great exodus of thousands of Tamils from Sri Lanka. They sought asylum from a brutal and bloody civil war fought along ethnic lines on the small island nation off the southern tip of India. Over the course of a decade, more than half a million Tamil civilians fled the country to India, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Australia. And they also came to Canada because it was known to have a history of providing safe haven for those who were escaping violence. Or did it?

On December 10, 2015, the day on which the first Syrian refugees arrived at Toronto’s Pearson Airport, the Toronto Star splashed a bold headline across its front page: “WELCOME TO CANADA.” The headline was accompanied by a photograph of a young boy, clad in a red-and-white striped T-shirt, shorts, and a cowboy hat, running through a grassy field holding a large Canadian flag above his head, billowing out behind him. “Ahlan wa sahlan,” the article began. “You’re with family now. And your presence among us makes our Christmas season of peace and joy just that much brighter.” It went on to say, “It’s been a long trek, but you are no longer refugees. Your days of being strangers in a strange land are over.”³

Some thirty years earlier, the same newspaper had run the following story:

More than 150 Sri Lankan men, women and children, found adrift off the coast of Newfoundland in crammed open lifeboats yesterday, arrived safely in port here this morning after being rescued by Canadian fishermen. As startled immigration officials here and in Ottawa pondered what to do with this unprecedented load of alleged refugees, the 152 castaways claimed they are Tamils fleeing persecution in strife-torn Sri Lanka.⁴

The words “alleged,” “claimed,” “startled,” and “unprecedented load” are notable and markedly different from the tone of the Toronto Star headline of 2015.

One of the refugees in that overcrowded lifeboat spoke with me in the winter of 2016, providing personal testimony of his experiences fleeing Sri Lanka, his time in the lifeboat, and his years toiling in the kitchens of Toronto restaurants. He asked that I not use his name because he was ashamed, so I will call him “Anonymous”:

Although it has been thirty years since we arrived, I still feel ashamed. If we had arrived by airplane, we would feel better. In the early days, the white people would shame us for arriving on a boat. They called us “boat people” and used it as a demeaning and subjugating term. I worked in kitchens as a prep cook and got into many arguments with the bosses about the condition of our arrival. I tried to tell them the story, but they did not want to hear it. They accused us of being so poor that we were opportunists who jumped the queue for a better life. We did not want to leave—we had to leave or die!⁵

He was not alone in this shame. The Tamil boat people were greeted by a significant amount of backlash. People wrote letters to leading newspapers denouncing them, with many writers urging the government to “send the Tamils back where they came from.” One reader went to the extreme of suggesting in his letter to the Toronto Sun that the Canadian government should have “sunken the lifeboats.”⁶ Furthermore, these refugees were shamed from within their own community. Although Tamil Canadians in Montréal and Toronto offered assistance, others within the community thought that the boat people had improperly jumped the queue, lied to Canadian authorities, and had paid large sums of money to be smuggled here, giving all Tamil Canadians a bad name. Many within the community distanced themselves from those who had arrived in the lifeboats. As time passed, a cloud of shame grew around the lifeboat, its journey, and the Tamil boat people.

Since the 1980s, Sri Lanka, formerly known as Ceylon, had been embroiled in a protracted and devastating civil war that had polarized its citizens along ethnic lines—a Sinhalese Buddhist majority and a Tamil Hindu minority. After the nation’s independence from Britain in 1948, the majority Sinhalese expressed pent-up hostilities toward the minority Tamils by passing several highly discriminatory regulations. In response, Tamils agitated for a separate state. Tensions exploded into ongoing, communal violence that resulted in tremendous casualties and suffering on both sides. In 1956, for example, violence erupted when Sinhala was made the official language under the Sinhala Only Act. Further riots occurred in 1958, after an agreement partially rescinding the ban on Tamil as an official language was revoked. Perhaps as many as 1,500 Tamils were slaughtered, and many thousands displaced.⁷ Recollecting those events, Toronto Tamil elder Sri Guggan Sri-Skanda-Rajah described an unforgettable day:

On May 25, 1958, when I was 15 years old, seventy Tamil people sought refuge at my parents’ home in the outskirts of Colombo. They were running away from a Sinhalese mob of about 3,000 looking for blood. They were finally rescued by a platoon of [Sinhalese] Army volunteers. They first saved the women and children and then came back for the men.⁸

The conflict continued for decades, marked by bouts of violence through the late 1960s, 1970s, and in 1983, Army volunteers disarmed the Tamils and instead of offering them protection as they had done in 1958, handed the Tamils over to the Sinhalese rioters. The ongoing oppressive conditions and subjugation laid the foundation for armed uprisings by many Tamil resistance/guerrilla groups, each vying for superiority. Eventually, in 1976, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)—commonly known as the Tamil Tigers—rose to prominence with the goal of establishing Tamil Eelam, an independent Tamil state in northern and eastern Sri Lanka. On July 23, 1983, when the LTTE killed thirteen Sri Lankan Army soldiers in a planned ambush, all hell broke loose and ignited the defining deadly riots known as Black July.

From Sunday, July 24, to Saturday, July 30, Colombo, the cosmopolitan capital city, was the centre of looting, killing, and ethnic cleansing. Spurred on by nationalist Sinhala-Buddhist fervour, mobs of Sinhalese men armed with knives, steel rods, and machetes, roamed the streets looking for blood. They were also armed with electoral voter lists that showed where the Tamil homes were located. For seven days and nights, Tamil-owned shops, businesses, homes, and Tamils themselves were the targets of heinous crimes. Numerous eyewitness accounts exist of Tamil women and girls who were gang-raped by mobs, then brutally killed or set on fire or by other brutalities, including decapitation.⁹

Black July sparked the mass exodus of mostly young Tamil men whose future held either a rebel uniform, a prisoner of the state uniform, or death. Those who had the means fled the island nation by any means necessary. Anonymous told me that his family had found the money to pay for a plane ticket on a flight out of Sri Lanka, but first he had to travel by bus from his home in Jaffna, on the northern tip of the island, to the airport in Colombo, some 400 kilometres south. The people on the bus were all Tamil, and he was the youngest. There were several Sinhalese checkpoints along the route, and he recounted to me the day the bus was stopped at one checkpoint and they were all ordered to get off the bus:

The soldiers separated me and put a gun to my chest. They wanted to kill me. They asked me to show my ID. So I held up the ID with both my hands. The ID was in Tamil, Sinhala and English but the Sinhala soldier could not read at all. So, in frustration he hit me, hard. He then asked a Muslim soldier to translate. I told them that I was a businessman, and I was going to Colombo to have my passport renewed. This was all translated to the Sinhalese soldier by the Muslim soldier. The Sinhala soldier then ordered me to run and to not look back. I began to run saying, “Please don’t shoot!” I ran for dear life because they kept shooting to scare me. They had also ordered the bus driver to get going without me. So, I ran alongside the bus and eventually managed to get back on the bus.

Tamils took circuitous routes through many Eastern Bloc countries that during that time did not require visas for entry, such as the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, where the Berlin Wall was still in place. His recollection continued:

I flew to Berlin, East Germany. Back then we did not need visas for East Germany. In Berlin we made a run for it across the Berlin Wall and crossed over in the middle of the night. Then by train into West Germany, where I claimed refugee status and was sent to a refugee camp. I spent 22 months in Germany in a refugee camp. We were not allowed to move around too much and could not work. I learned to cook in the refugee camps.

The Tamils lived under rigid regulations in West German refugee compounds. Although they were housed and received social assistance, they were prevented from seeking employment, had travel restrictions, and were not allowed to study. The refugees also feared the possibility that the West German government, who viewed these Tamils as economic refugees, would deport them back to Sri Lanka. In an interview published in the October 1986 issue of the journal Refuge, Sri-Skanda-Rajah asserted that “faced with the prospect of forcible removal back to Sri Lanka or to some other unknown place and the accompanying danger and uncertainty this prospect posed, the Tamils chose to come to Canada by surreptitious means.”¹⁰

As Anonymous explained, word spread through the refugee compound that an agent could arrange passage on a German freighter that was ready to smuggle them to Canada. The total cost, he said, was 5,000 Deutsche Marks, with 3,000 to be paid to the agent before boarding, and the rest upon arrival in Canada. The refugees somehow found the money and bought hope as passengers on board a 424-ton freighter named the Aurigae, owned and operated by Wolfgang Bindel, a West German citizen.¹¹ The journey began on a late July afternoon. They were herded into a minivan on the way to the ship that would take them to a new land and their new lives. Late that night, under the cloak of darkness, the Aurigae left the Weser River port of Brake, north of Bremen, Germany with all their fears, hopes, and dreams illegally packed inside. They were promised rooms, beds, food, water, and a good journey and told that they would reach Canada in three to four days. He continued his story:

All of this was a lie. As we found out none of this was true. We were 156 strangers who boarded that ship in Germany. For eleven days, we are sitting in fear in the cargo ship. All 156 passengers survived on the floor of the ship. We were all strangers. There were three or four women and a few children. The bread went mouldy in a few days so we had to just cook rice and frozen chicken or a simple congee. Our people cooked together. People were getting sick and some threw up. The ship was very dirty. We were all on the floor all the time. No beds, no berth, no comfort. We were refugees.

Fourteen days later, with only the clothes on their backs, Bindel forced them off the Aurigae into two lifeboats somewhere in the North Atlantic. Adrift for days without food or water and with no land in sight, they were ready to jump overboard into the salty seas, and some of them made a suicide pact. The panicked mother and father of a six-month-old baby were among those making death pacts, ready to plunge to their end. Gandhi remembered the moment:

The boat was full of water, and we thought that we were all going to die. When the six-month-old baby had cried itself into silence, we thought the baby had died. The mother of the baby vowed that, if her baby dies, she would jump into the water and kill herself. The father and mother were seated next to me, so I consoled them by saying that we had all taken a huge chance, travelled a long distance, and paid huge sums of money to come to Canada and that we should continue to keep our faith that we will reach Canada. For three days, we had no water to drink, no food to eat, and we couldn’t move, so we just remained where we sat. And I’m even ashamed to speak about this now but we even had to defecate just where we sat.¹²

Out in the gentle swells just outside St. Mary’s Bay, Newfoundland, the fishing longboat, the Atlantic Reaper, steamed alongside two open lifeboats that were joined together by a simple rope. Squinting through the fog, Gus Dalton, the skipper, eyed the strange cargo: scores of people, black-haired and dark-skinned. Huddled together and waterlogged were 155 people in two boats designed to carry thirty-five each. “You couldn’t see between them—they was so crowded,” remarked Dalton. “All I could see was heads. I figured they was boat people.”¹³

Most surprising—and heart wrenching—was how young many of the castaways were. Some were barely out of their teens. They were young men who had been separated from their parents for the first time because their very age and gender made them more vulnerable as potential recruits for the Tamil anti-government militants and therefore as targets of the state security forces. “The consideration of our families was that we should be sent away so that at least one survives,” said Ramanathan, one of the Tamil refugees who had sought passage on the Aurigae. He added that “we had heard of and seen friends taken away by the Army to the camps, so I wanted to go out of the country.”¹⁴

When they arrived in St. John’s, Newfoundland, they faced many questions. Where had they come from? How did they manage the Atlantic crossing? Who set them adrift with no food and water in crammed lifeboats? How did they manage to survive for days out on the open sea? It didn’t take long for many, often contradictory, versions of events to emerge. Once again, Tamil elder Sri-Skanda-Rajah provided some context:

It was natural that they would want to take the steps necessary to ensure their safety and security. It is only in light of these extenuating circumstances that their actions can be understood. Unfortunately, the method they chose, and the story they decided to tell, adversely affected their reception in Canada.¹⁵

Despite the many uncertainties and remaining questions about their arrival, then Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney granted the Tamils one-year ministerial permits to stay and work. Furthermore, in response to criticism and calls for immigration reform, he emphasized that the need for reform was separate from the question of whether or not Canada would offer protection to refugees who arrived on its shores. Mulroney sent a clear message with his statement that “Canada was built by immigrants and refugees, and those who arrive in lifeboats off our shores are not going to be turned away.”¹⁶

For many Tamil refugees who arrived in Toronto during this time, their first home was the downtown community of St. James Town, an area full of high-rise apartments that proudly described itself as “the most densely populated neighbourhood in Canada.”¹⁷ It was also just a few blocks from my home in the 1980s. In those early days, almost all Tamil refugees were young single men. They had to survive. They worked multiple shifts, lived together in groups to cut costs, and shared beds on a rotating schedule.¹⁸ Once these young men had jobs, they sent portions of their earnings back home to pay off debts—usually incurred to make the journey to Canada—and to help their families. Soon, Tamil-owned retail businesses flourished in the vicinity of my neighbourhood, helping to revitalize a depressed area. Since their sizable population required culturally specific goods and services, the entrepreneurs in the community opened grocery and clothing stores, bookshops and libraries, newspapers, radio and television stations, temples, and churches.

It wasn’t long before I noticed brown-skinned brothers working in the kitchens of Toronto’s bustling restaurant scene. They washed dishes, cleaned tables, and cooked behind the scenes. Although they remained invisible beyond the kitchens, their culinary skills were visible on the plates of discriminating restaurant patrons. They cooked every food imaginable: from risotto to ratatouille, brisket to Bolognese. These brown-skinned brothers infiltrated the restaurant industry—but only through the back doors. I noticed they were not on the front lines as hosts, waiters, or bartenders, and remained away from direct contact with clientele. I wondered if this was by circumstance or design. I wanted to explore and understand their struggle, displacement, migration, settlement, and agitation, at least by some, for the restoration of a Tamil homeland—Tamil Eelam—on the island of Sri Lanka. Since the crushing of the Tamil Tigers by the Sri Lankan military in 2009, the struggle had continued, even in the diaspora.¹⁹

This exploration led me toward the initial research for a documentary film about the Tamil Sri Lankan diaspora’s journey to Canada. Despite some progress in locating a significant number of people who sought refuge in those lifeboats in 1986, I encountered problems. For many the topic was taboo. There was much fear and mistrust in the air. Though all 155 Tamil refugees rescued from the lifeboats were granted special ministerial permits, which allowed them to stay and work in Canada, most were highly reticent to tell their stories on camera. As the war in Sri Lanka was actively raging in the early years of the twenty-first century, the former refugees feared for their lives and for the safety of loved ones back home, or were afraid of being deported for entering Canada illegally. Still others feared intimidation by the Tamil Tigers, whose Toronto representatives engaged in sometimes aggressive fundraising activities.²⁰ In the early days, even my research interviews with subjects in the Tamil Canadian community generated allegations that I was a spy for the Indian Army. Some subjects agreed to do interviews but then denied permission for me to use them afterwards. Others agreed only to audio interviews without identification to retain their anonymity.

Nobody seemed to see this project as valuable or interesting, including broadcasters and the National Film Board of Canada. After several years and much work, I became discouraged and demoralized. I had reached a dead end. Faced with the economic pressures of sustaining a small independent production company and coupled with the broadcast industry’s lack of interest in the “Tamil Sri Lankan” subject, prospects of moving forward with this production were bleak. With regret, I placed the project on the back burner. A dozen years later, I seized an extraordinary opportunity through a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) documentary media program at Ryerson University and revived the journey of the Tamil Sri Lankan diaspora as my thesis documentary project.

I began my research anew but quickly realized that with the passage of time (three decades since the first arrival of the Tamil refugees), the stories had changed, and so had I. And there were new stories—those who moved beyond the Sri Lankan trauma into a fresh twenty-first-century start in Canada. I envisioned a hybrid between a site-specific performance and a live documentary during which the primary documentary subjects and the audience would be present inside a site integral to the story, in this case a café. Brothers in the Kitchen premiered as part of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in May 2016. On that night, thirteen subjects of the documentary, who were people of all ages, amateurs and professionals, authors and politicians, told their stories live to an audience seated within the same space.

Leading up to that documentary festival premiere, in January 2016 I was also involved in both the planning and execution of an important reunion in Newfoundland to mark the 30th anniversary of the arrival and rescue of the 155 Tamil refugees off the Avalon peninsula in August 1986. I was given exclusive access to document the process and, as a member of the planning committee, I actively participated by sharing my research, ideas, connections, and know-how. In fact, I profoundly influenced the story, and even changed history: as a result of my ongoing independent research, I located one of the two original lifeboats in which the Tamil refugees had arrived. I advocated for the lifeboat’s inclusion in the reunion itinerary, and the lifeboat became the centrepiece of that reunion. Sometimes, the stars align and offer fantastical gifts. The seeds I had planted years earlier as part of my research came to fruition at this reunion. Akin to what NHL hockey fans refer to as a “hat trick” (when a player scores three goals in a single game), three incredible touchstones were the gifts to the reunion.

On August 11, 2016, a yellow school bus filled with a large group of Tamil Canadians, former and current Canadian MPs, my documentary film crew, journalists, and friends left St. John’s, Newfoundland, and headed south toward the small fishing village of Holyrood on the Avalon Peninsula. There, four former Tamil Sri Lankan refugees—Baskaran, Shanmuga Paul, Siva, and Gandhi—were reunited with one of the two lifeboats in which they and the other passengers on the Aurigae had been set adrift three decades earlier. That powerful moment was not only witnessed by those present but also by thousands of virtual onlookers through tweets, blogs, and texts. At least sixteen print media outlets from coast to coast, as well as national broadcasters CBC and CTV, covered the story.

The entire entourage then travelled farther south to St. Mary’s Bay and reunited with retired fisherman Captain Gus Dalton, who had found and rescued the refugees on the same date back in 1986. After many tears, reminiscing, lunch, and cake, we returned to St. John’s for a news conference on board the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) ship Leonard J. Cowley, which had arrived in St. John’s for refuelling. This was the same CCG ship that had picked up the refugees rescued by Captain Gus Dalton and had brought them to St. John’s. In addition, the press conference was hosted by CCG Assistant Commissioner Wade Spurrell, who welcomed the refugees back to where they’d first made landfall thirty years ago. He was the chief officer on the Leonard J. Cowley and was aboard the night they picked up the Tamil refugees. “Men and women of the Canadian Coast Guard often have a chance to help mariners and people in distress on the water,” Spurrell stated, noting that only very rarely “do people come back to see us, so this is very remarkable for us.”²¹ My documentary research connected me directly to the CCG and to the assistant commissioner, whom I had met with the day before and planned the subsequent press conference.

Interestingly, there was a related story unfolding involving the community, its leaders, and the storyteller. It was a delicate negotiation between what the community wanted to show, what the leaders wanted to shape, and what this storyteller wanted to reveal. It was then that I understood that the story and the lifeboat were larger than me. The boat had become a symbol that closed the circle and celebrated the community. Without consultation with me or with any of the Tamils who were passengers on the lifeboat, the Canadian Tamil Congress (CTC), which organized the reunion in Newfoundland, purchased the lifeboat, transported it to Toronto, and proudly displayed it at Tamilfest—the Tamil Street Festival in Scarborough held at the end of August 2016. Consciously or unconsciously, the CTC used the lifeboat as a tool to legitimize the community’s arrival narrative. The boat came to symbolize the Tamil refugees and has taken on new meaning for the Tamil Sri Lankan community and Canadians at large. It has also given Canada a second chance to properly welcome the Tamil refugees and embrace the community.

In August 2010, ten months after a Thai ship, the Ocean Lady, had arrived on the west coast with 76 Tamil refugees on board, another Thai cargo ship named the Sun Sea appeared off the coast of Vancouver Island with 492 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees on board. Back in August 1986, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had offered comforting words, assistance, and ministerial permits to a similar group of refugees. Under the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canada’s welcome to these asylum seekers was very different, as a Canadian Council for Refugees report on the two incidents notes:

The passengers [of both ships] were subjected by the government to prolonged detention, intensive interrogation and energetic efforts to exclude them from the refugee process, or to contest their claim if they succeeded in entering the refugee process. Canada’s immigration legislation was amended to give the government extraordinary new powers, many apparently unconstitutional, to detain people and deny them a wide range of rights. [. . .] There was loud and strident public messaging about the alleged dangers presented by the arrival of the passengers. Yet, few have been found to represent any kind of security concern and almost two-thirds of the passengers whose claims have been heard have been found to be refugees in need of Canada’s protection.

The trend continued. Five years after the arrival of the Sun Sea, Canada had “dramatically closed its doors on refugees, breached its international human rights obligations, and lost its reputation as a world leader in refugee protection.”²²

When I invited my anonymous confidant to join the other former passengers of the lifeboat at Tamilfest as a proud ambassador, or at least as a silent witness to the changing reception of the lifeboat, he declined, still too ashamed to come, for fear of revealing his origins as an illegal immigrant (as he described himself), or simply as a lowly boat person who ended up in a kitchen. I have let him have the last say:

I’m the only one in my family that left Sri Lanka. I went back in 1994 to get married. Up till that time I was a supporter of the Tamil rebels, but what I witnessed in Jaffna during that time. I no longer support any side. Our Tamil people were used for the drama of the civil war, and we have paid a heavy price. I’m no longer interested in a fucking Tamil Eelam. This is my home now. I’ll die in Canada. I got married, and we have two children. My children would like to visit Sri Lanka but not live there. Their lives are also in Canada. I am so grateful for the government of Brian Mulroney. He was good to us.

“I still hate the term ‘boat people,’” he added. “I do not want to be known by that name.”

1 The exact number of refugees cited in this chapter varies across recollections and news reports. While these inconsistencies have been preserved, I have chosen to use 155—the number given, for example, in a relatively recent Maclean’s article that recounts the events of 1986. See Lyndsay Jones, “How a Newfoundland Fisherman Became Godfather to a Generation of Tamil Canadians,” Maclean’s, January 31, 2018.

2 Commentary by Kathryn Wright, “Sri Lankan Migrants Rescued off Newfoundland,” The National, with Knowlton Nash, CBC Television, August 12, 1986, http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1707584996.

3 “Welcome to Canada,” Toronto Star, December 10, 2015, https://www.pressreader.com/canada/toronto-star/20151210/281479275354062.

4 Alan Story and Joseph Hall, “152 Castaways Paid Thousands to Flee to Canada,” Toronto Star, August 12, 1986.

5 Transcribed interview notes from a conversation, in Tamil, with the author held in Toronto on April 4, 2016; here and elsewhere, all translations are my own. This interview, from which I quote further below, was among those I conducted for my live documentary Brothers in the Kitchen (2016), which was performed on May 4, 2016, in Toronto. For the final script, see Cyrus Sundar Singh, “Brothers in the Kitchen: The Uprising, Exodus and Survival of a Tamil Minority,” MFA thesis, Ryerson University, 2016, 45–77.

6 Selva Ponnuchami, “Rescue of 155 Tamil Refugees from Two Lifeboats off the Coast of Newfoundland: Thirty Years Ago . . .” Monsoon Journal, July 2016, https://issuu.com/monsoonjournal/docs/mj_july_2016_web, p. 19. Ponnuchami was the president of the Eelam Tamil Association of Quebec at the time the refugees arrived.

7 “Massacres, Pogroms, Destruction of Property, Sexual Violence and Assassinations of Civil Society Leaders,” International Human Rights Association Bremen, submission to the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, second session of the Peoples’ Tribunal on Sri Lanka, Bremen, December 7–10, 2013, http://www.ptsrilanka.org/pogroms-and-massacres/, 7.

8 Interview with the author, April 23, 2004, Toronto.

9 See Eleanor Pavey, “The Massacres in Sri Lanka During the Black July Riots of 1983,” May 13, 2008, Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, Mass Violence and Resistance Research Network, Sciences Po, https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/massacres-sri-lanka-during-black-july-riots-1983. For a chronology, see “Events of Black July,” Black July ’83: Remembering Silenced Voices (website), 2009, http://www.blackjuly83.com/EventsofBlackJuly.htm.

10 “An Interview on the Case of the 155 Tamil Refugees,” Refuge 6, no. 1 (1986): 8–9, https://refuge.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/refuge/article/view/21493, 8. At the time, Sri-Skanda-Rajah was a community legal aid worker in Toronto and vice-chair of the Toronto Refugee Affairs Council.

11 James M. Markham, “Tamils off Canada Fled Germany, Police Say,” New York Times, August 16, 1986, https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/16/world/tamils-off-canada-fled-germany-police-say.html. Unsurprisingly, Bindel told a different story: see James M. Markham, “German Captain Denies Role in Tamils’ Journey, New York Times, August 17, 1986, http://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/17/world/german-captain-denies-role-in-tamils-journey.html. See also Andrew Maykuth, “Unraveling the Mystery of Tamils’ Flight to Canada,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 17, 1986, http://www.maykuth.com/archives/tamil86.htm.

12 Tape-recorded interview, in Tamil, with Annalingam Suhapiranan (a.k.a. “Gandhi”), August 12, 2016, in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

13 Quoted in Alan Story and Joseph Hall, “152 Castaways Paid Thousands to Flee to Canada,” Toronto Star, August 12, 1986.

14 Quoted in Paul Watson and Paula Todd, “Tamils’ Lot: Hard Work Long Hours,” Toronto Star, August 11, 1987.

15 “An Interview on the Case of the 155 Tamil Refugees,” 8.

16 Quoted in Jeff Bradley, “Prime Minister Vows That Sri Lankans Will Not Be Turned Away,” AP News, August 18, 1986, https://apnews.com/538dc177df174766db50320868938c30. See also Alexandra Mann, “Refugees Who Arrive by Boat and Canada’s Commitment to the Refugee Convention: A Discursive Analysis,” Refuge 26, no. 2 (2009): 191–206, https://refuge.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/refuge/article/view/32088, esp. 197–98.

17 “About the Neighbourhood,” St. James Town: A World Within a Block, accessed July 10, 2020, https://www.stjamestown.org/the-neighbourhood/#about-SJT.

18 Leonie Sandercock, The Quest for an Inclusive City: An Exploration of Sri Lankan Tamil Experience of Integration in Toronto and Vancouver, Working Paper no. 04–12, May 2004 (Burnaby, BC: Vancouver Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis, 2004), 12–13.

19 As poet and scholar Rudhramoorthy Cheran pointed out in 2013, “The demand for the recognition of Tamil as a nation is present in current articulations by the Tamil National Alliance and other Tamil parties, even though they are willing to live under a united Sri Lanka. This has become their discourse. But the contradiction is that the Tamil nation has become a ‘transnation’ because, while they have been fighting for territory, almost a million and a half Tamils have left the country, and the exodus continues.” “On Responsible Distance: An Interview with R. Cheran by Aparne Halpé,” University of Toronto Quarterly 84, no. 4 (Fall 2015): 90–108.

20 See Amarnath Amarasingam, Pain, Pride, and Politics: Social Movement Activism and the Sri Lankan Diaspora in Canada (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), pp. 1–2; “Tamil Tigers,” CBC News, April 20, 2009, updated May 19, 2009, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/tamil-tigers-1.783483.

21 Quoted in “Tamil Refugees Revisit N.L. Rescuers 30 Years Later,” The Telegram, August 11, 2016, http://www.thetelegram.com/news/local/tamil-refugees-revisit-nl-rescuers-30-years-later-127504/.

22 Canadian Council for Refugees, Sun Sea: Five Years Later, August 2015, https://ccrweb.ca/sites/ccrweb.ca/files/sun-sea-five-years-later.pdf, 1.