THE MARKING OF TAMIL YOUTH AS TERRORISTS AND THE MAKING OF CANADA AS A WHITE SETTLER SOCIETY by Gillian Geetha Philipupillai A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Graduate Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Social Justice Education Ontario Institute of Studies in Education University of Toronto © Copyright by Gillian Geetha Philipupillai (2013) ii THE MARKING OF TAMIL YOUTH AS TERRORISTS AND THE MAKING OF CANADA AS A WHITE SETTLER SOCIETY Master of Arts 2013 Gillian Geetha Philipupillai Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Social Justice Education University of Toronto Abstract This thesis examines the production of Tamil youth in the state of Canada as threats, extremists, radicals, terrorists, and as subjects to be engaged in de-politicized humanitarian discourses of reconciliation and peace. By drawing attention to the exclusion of Tamils from rights in legal proceedings, the positioning of youth protesters as harbingers of a multicultural ‘crisis,’ and the role of education in securing Canada’s response to the MV Sun Sea as a ‘humanitarian’ project, I argue that the targeting Tamils is not only integral to Sri Lanka’s ongoing genocide, but is also crucial to the Canadian state’s project of white settler colonialism. In examining the law, media and education as sites of racial management in the ‘War on Terror’ and its globalized counter-terrorism regime I identify the targeting of Tamil diaspora youth as a necessary racial logic for the legitimacy of the Canadian state in an era of official multiculturalism. iii Acknowledgments The first time I visited Canada as a young child, my father bought me a map of the world. Back home in Singapore as we unrolled it, I remember his shocked reaction— the map had the American continent right smack in the centre with Asia bisected on either side of it. “North Americans” he said, shaking his head, “think they are the centre of the world.” My father’s solution was a simple one: he cut off the left side of the map and re-attached it to the right side. In some ways, this thesis is like that ‘corrected’ map that hung on my wall for many years. As a project that responds to dominant representations of ‘Tamilness’ in the West, it comes from an (at times visceral) impulse, as one of those diaspora Tamils, to set the record straight. But like the map, it is also exists within the very forms of knowledge production that it seeks to challenge. Nevertheless I hope that this work contributes, from Eelam to Turtle Island, to the project of resisting, organizing, and theorizing against colonial states, borders, and maps. I would not have begun or finished this thesis without the guidance, feedback, and scholarship of my supervisor Prof. Sherene Razack whose work on race and political community made it possible for me to even imagine attempting this project. My reader Prof. Martin Cannon provided comments and feedback that helped me develop my arguments as well as future possibilities for research. Thank you both for your patience and encouragement. I have been influenced, challenged, supported and encouraged by many peers, friends, and co-conspirators. I am deeply grateful to have been surrounded by so many inspiring people, in and out of school. Most of all I am blessed to have been surrounded by a family that has always encouraged the development of my political thought. Mummy, thank you for teaching me how to read and making me the writer that I am. Dada, your commitment to learning is an inspiration. Annah, thank you for always listening. Together your belief in me sustains me, and I hope I do the same for you. iv Table of Contents Abstract..............................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgements...........................................................................................................iii Table of Contents..............................................................................................................iv Chapter ONE......................................................................................................................1 Introduction Chapter TWO..................................................................................................................22 ‘Long-Distance Nationalism’ and the Tamil Diaspora Chapter THREE..............................................................................................................43 The Racialization of Tamils as Terrorists in Canadian Courts, 1995-2012 Chapter FOUR.................................................................................................................71 “A right way and wrong way to protest”: The Framing of the Gardiner Protest as a Multicultural ‘Crisis’ Chapter FIVE...................................................................................................................88 “Those who need our protection”: Securing Canadian Humanitarianism in the Education of Detained Tamil Refugee Children Chapter SIX....................................................................................................................117 Conclusion References.......................................................................................................................122 1 Chapter ONE Introduction Take up the White Man's burden-- Send forth the best ye breed-- Go, bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need; To wait, in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild-- Your new-caught sullen peoples, Half devil and half child. --Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden: The United States & The Philippine Islands,” 1899. Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate. --Edward Said, 2003 Why have the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT), the Department of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, Public Safety Canada, and the Royal Bank of Canada funded programs to engage ‘young Canadians of Sri Lankan origin’ in reconciliation initiatives, peace dialogues, and the post-war rehabilitation and rebuilding of Sri Lanka? In this thesis I begin by exploring how these 2 programs, implemented by the Mosaic Institute, a think-tank for ‘Harnessing Canada’s Diversity for Peace at Home and Abroad,’ reveal the bodies of Tamil youth in the diaspora as targets and a key battleground in the globalized ‘War on Terror.’ I examine how the racialized bodies of Tamil youth are produced as ‘threats,’ ‘extremists,’ ‘radicals,’ ‘terrorists,’ and finally as subjects to be engaged in de-politicized humanitarian discourses of ‘reconciliation’ and ‘peace.’ I locate the intensifying racial management of Tamil youth within dominant Western racial narratives that secure the intertwined systems of white supremacy, white settler colonialism, state sovereignty, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. Critical studies of racialization in the post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’ have largely focused on the marking of Muslim bodies in the West (Razack, 2008; Thobani, 2007). Here I trace the marking of Tamils in the state of Canada. I am particularly attuned to the marking of Tamil youth, and their eviction from Canadian political community as a necessary, but relatively recent and increasingly intensified, racial logic in the globalized ‘War on Terror.’ Through an understanding of the ongoing production of Tamil youth in the West as threatening bodies, as always already terrorists, I attempt to uncover and draw attention to unexamined sites of racial management in the political landscape of counter-terrorism, such as education. I propose to explore how the ongoing racialization of diaspora Tamil youth as figures of terror and extremism plays a significant role in dominant Western representations of violence in Sri Lanka and the war between the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). This racialization works to justify both the 2009 genocide against Tamils on their homelands, and the ongoing military occupation of Tamil homelands by the GOSL. 3 The racialized bodies of Tamil youth have not been examined as a significant terrain on which the counter-terrorism efforts of the globalized ‘War on Terror’ are waged. As a population marked for surveillance and targeting through processes of racialization, diaspora Tamil youth face increased racialized management and monitoring for two main reasons. Firstly, the war between the GOSL and the LTTE was claimed in the post-9/11 era by the GOSL and Western powers as a battleground in the globalized ‘War on Terror.’ In part this thesis traces the grounds on which this claim is asserted, indicating that it is made possible, and functions because of the racialization of diaspora Tamils. Secondly, white settler colonialism, occupation, and denial of Indigenous sovereignty necessitate racial management and the making of racialized bodies into shifting borders constituting who belongs and who does not, who deserves protection, and who is a threat, who is a citizen, and who is a savage. In examining the inattention of scholars of race and racial formation towards settler colonialism, Andrea Smith identifies three pillars of white supremacy in the US context, “(1) slaveability/anti-black racism, which anchors capitalism; (2) genocide, which anchors colonialism; and (3) orientalism, which anchors war” (Smith, 2012, 68). In this thesis I attempt to connect the