[Tamil Mirror]
Winning justice for Suresh Sriskandarajah, an exceptional young Canadian who stands accused of conspiring to provide computer software to the Tamil Tigers by the United States government should be the concern of all fair minded Canadians. As his US legal team prepares his defence and as he awaits his extradition to the US by June 9, 2010, after both, his appeal against extradition and his bid to have his case heard in Canada, has failed, contrary to and in violation of his rights under the “Canadian Charter of Rights”, the “Justice for Suresh” campaign is calling on Canadians to join hands with them in their continuing fight to win justice for Suresh.
Suresh’s nightmare started in 2006 when a request for his extradition was made by the US government. Despite making a legal challenge and being subject to a long agonizing wait, he was ordered to be extradited to the US by the Superior Court of Ontario on March 5, 2009. An appeal against the extradition has been lodged and is in its final stages. It must be pointed out the validity of evidence is not assessed in extradition hearings but rather the decision rests entirely on obligations under the prevailing extradition treaty provisions between Canada and the US.
Although no charges have been filed to date, his extradition, to possibly face trial in the US, is sought on the grounds that he is alleged to have provided material support to the Tamil Tigers and other such related matters. The allegations against Suresh in no way relate to weapons but are computer-related and purport to evidence based on e-mail communication. These allegations date back prior to the banning of Tamil Tigers in Canada. Despite this fact the United States authorities have sought his extradition on the technicality that the e-mail computer server Suresh used was based in New York.
In addition, Suresh’s request for his trial to be held in Canada instead of the United States has been denied by the Minister of Justice. Suresh is currently released on bail until he surrenders to Canadian authorities for extradition to the US.
Suresh’s case merits understanding. He is exceptional and his story must be told. He is a young man of high academic achievements and outstanding leadership skills with a proven humanitarian record. What is most striking about him is his compassion for the less privileged and it is this compassion that has led him to become embroiled in this legal mess with adverse consequences to his potentially brilliant career.
Suresh was born in 1980 in Valvettithurai in northern Sri Lanka. He says “My earliest recollections of my family was of being mired in poverty and living among people who were in constant fear of the unpredictable behavior of the Sri Lankan soldiers who seemed to be everywhere.” In 1987 when Valvettithurai was bombed by the Sri Lankan armed forces and his house destroyed, Suresh and his family fled with their meager belongings and sought refuge in nearby villages. Unable to find steady employment his father was forced to flit from one odd job to another. By a stroke of good luck his father managed to find employment as a deck hand in a Saudi registered oil tanker, and soon thereafter his mother and he along with his two younger brothers returned to his village to try to make their house habitable once more and live in it.
The violence in Sri Lanka continued to escalate. On one occasion while Suresh was alone in the house, a visibly terrified young man ran in apparently to escape capture by the pursuing soldiers. Finding nowhere to hide in his small house and escape cut off, the young man bit into a glass vial that was strung round his neck and fell to the floor writhing in pain. Soon his body became motionless. Young Suresh looked on paralyzed by fear; it soon dawned on him that the young man had killed himself.
So, he ran out of his house and hid next door. Shortly thereafter, he saw the soldiers barge into his house and drag away the lifeless body of the young man. He was totally perplexed by what he had witnessed at such close quarters since until then he had never seen anyone dying. It was only later that he learned that the young man was from a nearby village and that he had taken his life to avoid being tortured by soldiers intent on extracting information about other suspected rebels.
On yet another occasion, Suresh was brutalized for no apparent reason at all by a group of rifle wielding soldiers. His injuries were so severe that he had to be hospitalized for three weeks. Subsequent to his brutal beating, his family became determined to flee Sri Lanka at the earliest opportunity.
Suresh was only nine years old when he arrived in Montreal in the middle of a cold winter. However, he quickly adjusted to the cold and enrolled in grade three in a nearby French language school.
At school, he excelled in both his studies and athletics. He joined the track and field team through the generosity of the gym teacher who paid the fee of $30. This enabled him to compete in various events and even run in the 3000 meters race at the Canadian Junior Olympics.
Says Suresh of his early days in Montreal, “I am eternally grateful to the many acts of kindness shown to my family and me by so many, including complete strangers, while we lived in Montreal. Such acts have left in our hearts an indelible impression of the basic goodness and large-hearted generosity of fellow Canadians from all walks of life. Because of these early experiences in Montreal, I was determined to elevate my status in Canada from a mere refugee to a full Canadian citizen in the shortest time possible and contribute my might to helping others irrespective of who they were. My dream of becoming a full and proud Canadian citizen was fulfilled in 1994.” Wishing to be bilingual and proficient in both French and English to broaden his career prospects, Suresh moved to Toronto and boarded with a family while attending an English language school. He started in grade eight and by the time he reached grade ten he had managed to build up enough savings by taking on after school jobs so as to make him financially independent.
While in high school, Suresh started a Webmaster Club and encouraged fellow students to join the club and learn how to design Internet websites. In due course, he helped to develop and transform the club not only into a Grade 10 Information Technology Management Course but also helped teach the course to fellow Grade 10 students. This course proved to be so popular among the students that it was credited with contributing to enhancing student retention in this Jane-Finch school.
His initiative in setting up the Information Technology Management Course was rewarded with a job with the Xerox Corporation while he was merely 15 years of age. In this job, he was required to speak at conventions about opportunities for Internet applications in education. With the confidence and skills learned from this rather unique experience Suresh was able to establish his own web site development company called ‘Media Icon’. He was able to use Media Icon to render additional specialized community service by helping to create customized web sites free-of-charge to worthy charities.
While in grade 11, Suresh became the proud recipient of one of five Canada Trust Horizon Scholarships that are awarded in recognition of both academic excellence and community involvement and service. This scholarship provided $10,000 towards his university education and summer jobs at Canada Trust. In addition, he received numerous school citations including the Good Citizen award, Students for Peace award, and Leadership and Innovation award.
The following year, Suresh was selected to participate in the International Co-op Program that enabled him to work in a company of his choice during the first four months and take on a development partnership with overseas placement during the remaining two months. Thereupon he was chosen to first work with the IBM Corporation and then to work in the Caribbean island of Dominica with ‘Cable and Wireless’, a British telecommunications company.
Suresh graduated from high school with a 95.7 percent average, which enabled him to fulfill his dream of entering the University of Waterloo’s co-op Electrical Engineering program with two scholarships.
Due to his high school work experience with large corporations and entrepreneurial activities, Suresh was hired while in his first year at the University of Waterloo for highly paid co-op placements that even fourth-year students would have envied. These plum and prestigious co-op placements included working in Microsoft, NVIDIA, Amazon.com and RIM.
At the end of his second year at university, Suresh was able to fulfill yet another of his childhood dreams: that of helping his family buy a house by making the down payment from the monies he had saved up from various awards he had from time-to-time received and the well paid job placements that came his way.
In his third year, Suresh worked with the University of Waterloo’s co-op program, which enabled him to further extend his ability to help fellow students to better match their needs with those of the host organizations. In early 2004, Suresh went on a University approved co-op placement to Sri Lanka, where besides helping to create the curriculum at the fledging Vanni Institute of Technology (which received support from Microsoft), he coordinated the deployment of skilled personnel at a solar panel factory, and also designed and uploaded an online sponsorship program to help an orphanage (Senthalir Illam) to reach would be sponsors and vice versa.
In December 2004, Suresh returned to Sri Lanka. Besides learning about and savoring his rich cultural heritage, he also became more aware of the extremely poor living conditions of the people in the land of his birth. His itinerary included a visit to the “Senthalir Illam” orphanage for which Suresh had earlier set up a sponsorship program. Though Suresh had planned to spend Christmas day at the orphanage to give gifts and cheer the children with dances and games his plans were disrupted by heavy rains that made the roads impassable.
The following day, the Boxing Day tsunami devastated the whole of the eastern seaboard of Sri Lanka, destroying everything in its path including the orphanage that he had planned to visit. The tsunami was a very personal and profound tragedy of unimaginable magnitude for him as it killed all but 30 of the 170 resident children of the Senthalir Illam orphanage.
Suresh could not but extend his stay in Sri Lanka to help in the aftermath of the tsunami’s horrifying and heartbreaking destruction to help in clearing dead bodies, settling the living in refugee camps, and handling logistics for foreign media. The tragedy and the suffering resulting from the tsunami was made more painful by the efforts made by the Sri Lankan government to effect an inequitable distribution of aid to tsunami victims on the basis of ethnicity, as bulk of the foreign aid was redirected away from the north-east regions to the southern areas where the damage was considerably less in overall terms. This act of ethnic discrimination reflects the stark reality and tragedy of life in Sri Lanka.
Upon his return to Canada, Suresh assisted the Canadian Red Cross on speaking tours to inform audiences about the importance of providing aid, but also, sensitizing the aid workers to the issue of monitoring the distribution of foreign aid so as to ensure to the best of their ability that donations meant for the victims actually got to them. Suresh also provided logistical and technical support for the 2005 International Conference on Post Tsunami Development in Sri Lanka, and co-founded the ‘EngDev’ Tsunami Relief Engineering Project. This Project engaged Canadian students and academics in the long-term tsunami relief efforts for all the affected regions in Asia, focusing on initiatives that enable people to free themselves from aid dependence and progress towards self-sufficiency and independence. As a part of this humanitarian assistance to help survivors of the tsunami get back on their feet Suresh undertook to purchase and ship laptop computers to the Vanni Institute of Technology, where he had worked during his “co-op” work term in 2004. In recognition of his invaluable humanitarian work in Sri Lanka, Suresh was awarded the John McBain Scholarship for International Development by the University of Waterloo.
Upon graduating in April 2006 from the University of Waterloo with an Honors B.A.Sc. degree, Microsoft Corporation offered to employ Suresh at its head office and assured Suresh that it would keep its offer open for up to seven years.
In August 2006, while getting ready to take his young cousins to Wild Water Kingdom, RCMP officers arrived at his house and arrested Suresh under the US-Canada Extradition Act and informed him that the US government wanted him extradited from Canada, alleging that his (humanitarian) work in Sri Lanka during the ceasefire period had been viewed as aiding the “Tamil Tigers” an organization that was at that time not proscribed in Canada but proscribed in the US.
It’s was a shock to Suresh as well as to those who know him that his work with civilians in northern Sri Lanka could be misrepresented as criminal. Suresh would not hurt even a fly.
All Suresh wanted was to help the orphaned children. He was fully committed to better the lives and living conditions of the people in the land of his birth in northern Sri Lanka. His priority was both to improve educational standards and to introduce the latest information technology to young adults there. It became his calling and he couldn’t erase Senthalir Illam orphanage or Vanni Institute of Technology from his mind. It was natural for Suresh; Suresh felt this way towards all people who were less privileged. Furthermore, all his visits to Sri Lanka had taken place during the ceasefire period when there was no fighting between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers. This was also a time when the Tamil Tigers were neither banned in Sri Lanka or Canada. In addition, there were no restrictions whatsoever on travel to and within Sri Lanka. Hence, it is quite incomprehensible how his purely humanitarian work in northern Sri Lanka could ever have been misrepresented as breaking the laws of either Canada of which he is a citizen or of Sri Lanka.
As such, it would appear that the US government’s extradition request is based on the mere technicality that Suresh’s email correspondence via “Hotmail” dealing with arrangements to supply laptop computers to the Vanni Institute of Technology had been routed through an internet server, that is based in New York, where Tamil Tigers are a proscribed organization.
Subsequent to Suresh’s arrest by the RCMP in August 2006, he has, invoking the Canadian Charter of Rights, appealed to the Canadian sense of justice and fair play and requested Canadian authorities to intervene in the matter, rejecting the US extradition request and if necessary try his case here in Canada where he is confident that he will have no case to answer. Suresh is on bail, whilst his appeal is in its final stages; his request for his case to be heard in Canada has been declined.
Although on bail, Suresh’s life remains in limbo as he is debarred from taking up any employment. As such, Suresh has chosen to go back to school and continue his studies while engaging in volunteer work in Kitchener-Waterloo. As part of his studies he has been able to fast track a B.A. degree at the University of Waterloo, and has also completed an M.B.A. at Wilfrid Laurier University, where he won the prestigious CIBC Leaders in Entrepreneurship Award. Suresh is currently enrolled part-time in a doctoral program focusing on the management of technology.
Suresh is by any measure, clearly an outstandingly compassionate Canadian and an intelligent, able and productive member of Canadian society. Furthermore, he has amply demonstrated his creative and entrepreneurial spirit and leadership qualities. He needs the unstinting support of all Canadians to help him extricate himself from this outlandish situation where he, a Canadian citizen, is being extradited to the United States to face charges that haven’t yet been filed, that will not stand up to judicial review under Canadian law.
It’s sad that both Suresh’s innate compassionate nature and the endearing qualities he acquired through his life experiences, that had turned him into the fine young man he had become, has indeed landed him in the trouble he is in now.
Winning justice for Suresh is in our hands. As he surrenders to Canadian authorities on June 9 for extradition to the US, it’s for us, Canadians to become part of this humanitarian venture and rally as a community to help win justice for Suresh; and rally we must and rally we will.
Dr Sri Bavan and Usha S Sri-Skanda-Rajah
On behalf of Justice for Suresh
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