Once More With Feeling
27 April 2009, early morning
If you’ve been playing along at home, you should know that the LTTE are pinned down in a small corner of Sri Lanka with a ton of starving shell shocked civilians. The army rejected the LTTE’s unilateral ceasefire (whatever that means) and will probably ‘win’ the war some time very soon. Toronto Tamils are now protesting in front of the US embassy. There was a small (by Tamil protest standards) group of people in front of the US embassy Saturday night. Maybe a few 100 people, tops. Carvill and I drove past them on the way to dinner. Apparently as of this morning, that number has swollen to 4000 or so people. I suspect it will only get larger as the week goes on. The last big protest had well over 25,000 people, and took place when there was a chance civilian casualties could have been minimized and the LTTE could have been saved. We’re well past that point now.
Update: The Star reports the numbers are back down to a few 100 people. My guess is that it will be busy again after work. As with the last protest, there is all sorts of White Whine to read if you search on Twitter. The worse thing in the world is traffic, apparently.
why don’t you go to any of these protests Ram?
by tyler on April 27 2009, 3:29 pm #
If the protests were just about the humanitarian issues i’d go. Sadly, they never are. A lot of the time it feels like the protesters use the civilian casualties to push their pro-LTTE agenda. There are lots of reports of forced conscription by the LTTE since the fighting has flared up again, and of the LTTE shooting those civilians trying to flee the conflict zone. The protestors almost always ignore that. They wave their flags and bring their giant photos of Prabhakaran. I don’t want to be standing next to some dude with a placard saying, “the only choice is the LTTE and Tamil Eelam.”
by ramanan on April 27 2009, 4:07 pm #
Who’s organizing these things anyway?
by Ananthan on April 27 2009, 7:42 pm #
Why do you say “White Whine” when a lot of Torontonian’s of all colours have had enough of the protesters.
by siva on April 27 2009, 9:01 pm #
I mean in reference to this web site. Not literally White people complaining, but people in general complaining about the sort of first world problems that don’t really rate in the grand scheme of things — i.e. traffic is inconvenient.
by ramanan on April 27 2009, 10:16 pm #
University Students? That’s who were organizing the ones in the UK.
by ramanan on April 27 2009, 10:57 pm #