Results tagged “tamils”

Their large rallies have come and gone, but Toronto’s Tamils have yet to vacate the downtown core. Permanently located on the corner across from the U.S. Consulate, they continue to protest for all but fifteen minutes each day. During their only break at 9:30 every evening, they stand with candles along the east side of University Avenue to reflect on the lives lost during the decades-long Sri Lankan civil war.

       

Tamil candlelight vigil

       

There was a movie that played at Hot Docs called Reporter. It was about Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times columnist who globetrots to the sites of the world's worst humanitarian disasters in an effort to provide original reporting that will draw attention to crises of which very few people are aware. Most interestingly, Kristof stays up to date on all the latest psychology literature on the subject of compassion; he is obsessed with crafting stories that will move his readers to action. Anyone can write something that will prompt people to respond "oh, that's a shame" before moving on; it takes a special talent to rouse a readership to demand change or intervention or support. What has been concluded from various experiments is that humans' innate capacity for sympathy is extremely limited: we are more likely to be affected by the suffering of an individual than that of a group. Kristof therefore tends to focus on very particular tales of one person's exceptional affliction.

As members of the Tamil community continue their demonstrations against the conflict in Sri Lanka, a high-flying counter-protest is underway, in the form of a small airplane circling around central Toronto with an anti–Tamil Tigers message in tow. Reader Mark Ostler first noticed the lofty banner, which reads "Protect Canada. Stop Tamil Tigers!", from his office window downtown. Shortly thereafter, Torontoist contributor Jonathan Goldsbie captured the above photo from Kensington Market (flipped here so that the message reads from left to right).

Like you didn't know this was coming: after a lengthy protest that shut down University Avenue for several days at the end of last month, and Sunday night's Gardiner takeover, Tamil protesters have once again forced the closure of University Avenue southbound from Dundas Street West to Queen Street West. According to Toronto Police, the stretch of street "will remain closed until further notice." It's almost as though some Tamils are passionate about not having their friends and relatives destroyed in a brutal civil war or something, to the point where they would deem it acceptable to add a few minutes to some drivers' commutes. Animals, the lot of them!

Last night, several thousand Tamil protesters took over the Gardiner Expressway for several hours, the latest and most remarkable protest in a series of attention-grabbing moves by the Tamil community that included shutting down University Avenue for several days two weeks ago. The protesters' methods have, without a doubt, drawn an enormous amount of vitriol, but also a large amount of attention for their cause. Do the ends justify the means? And are the ends even justified at all?

Not long before dusk on Sunday night, several thousand Tamil protesters flowed onto the Gardiner Expressway, shutting it down shortly thereafter, to protest the ongoing violence in Sri Lanka. The Gardiner would remain shut down until about midnight, when the protest migrated off the roads and on to Queen's Park.

After several days of sustained protest from Toronto's Tamil community that effectively shut University Avenue down to traffic, the Toronto Police Service reports that—as of 9:13 a.m.—the street is back open in both directions [PDF].

             

The protest by Toronto's Tamil community in front of the U.S. consulate on University Avenue continued last night and throughout today, with the street remaining closed between Dundas Street West and Queen Street West. And although heavy rain had thinned the crowd yesterday morning to only a hundred or so protesters, the Toronto Star reports that their numbers had swelled back up to a thousand by noon today.

                            

For the third straight day, throngs of demonstrators from Toronto's Tamil community—the world's largest outside Sri Lanka—have congregated on University Avenue between Queen Street and Dundas, holding court outside the U.S. consulate. As of nine o'clock this morning, the percussive rhythm of drums and rallying cries continued to resound along the artery, hemmed in on either side by watchful, horse-mounted members of the Toronto Police Service.

                                        

A river of red flags flowed through the downtown core yesterday as thousands of Tamils lined the streets to protest the latest Sri Lankan government offensive in the long-running conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, claiming that thousands of civilians had been killed, injured, or forcibly relocated. After forming a human chain along the streets for much of the afternoon, the well-organized demonstration gathered at Union Station where police closed part of Front Street.