Logan Logendralingam said he believes the vandalism against Uthayan, his Tamil-language weekly, was connected to a meeting this month between three members of the Canada-Sri Lanka Business Council and Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa.
An anonymous caller said as much when he called Logendralingam Sunday morning, mentioning the meeting and calling the business delegation Longendralingam's "friends," people the caller said Uthayan had "promoted."
Longendralingam hadn't published anything about the trip and wasn't planning to, but a website in Sri Lanka had broken the news and it had spread through Scarborough's Tamil community.
Though a civil war on the island ended in defeat for Tamil Tiger rebels last year, thousands in the community voted to re-affirm their support for a separate Tamil state and some are preparing to elect a Tamil "trans-national government."
News of the trip may be incendiary because it presents the image of Tamil-Canadian business leaders shaking hands with Rajapaksa, a man whom Logendralingam said many in the community think of as "a killer" who still holds innocent Tamils captive.
Kula Sellathurai, the council's president, said he met Rajapaksa to hand him a $20,000 cheque for an orphanage run by the Sri Lankan leader's wife.
In an interview this week, Sellathurai said members of his group see fresh opportunities to start businesses in Sri Lanka and "bring normalcy" to the island, now that the decades-long conflict there has ended. Besides the president, he said, the delegation met a Roman Catholic bishop and the military commander and administrator in charge of the northernmost province. "They all gave us the same message: 'Come back and help.'"
Sellathurai said he's been both congratulated and criticized by community members since his return, but predicted that as investment and travel to the island grow, Tamil-Canadians will see conditions in Sri Lanka as more positive than portrayed in Tamil media.
"Things are much better than the negative message they hear every day," he said.
Logendralingam said he will report the vandalism and will mention in passing the attack is connected to Sellathurai's trip but added he has decided, for now, not to publish anything else on the business council tour - because that would endanger his safety.
"We already understand I've been punished for doing nothing, but if I do something (publicize the tour in detail) I'll be killed," Logendralingam said Wednesday.
If Sellathurai hosts a press event to explain his actions, which Sellathurai said may happen after his associates return from Sri Lanka, Logendralingam said he would cover that event,
In his 15 years of publishing Uthayan, he has faced criticism and intimidation before. Three years ago, a window of his office, then at Ellesmere Road, was broken the night after he ran an editorial calling for the relatives of whoever had killed a Tamil youth to help identify the guilty.
Two years earlier, Longendralingam was confronted by 25 people who objected to another editorial about a troubled youth and told him his opinion was wrong. "Don't do it again," they said.
A vice-president of the National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada, Longendralingam said some in the Tamil-Canadian community still see the act of publishing news they don't like as an offence.
"That mentality should be changed," he said, but explained in Sri Lanka "the government is killing the journalists," both Tamil and majority Sinhalese, for writing unfavourable articles, "so our people are following the same thing here."
David Jeyaraj, another Scarborough-based editor, had received threatening calls after he reported Tiger defeats in his own weekly, Muncharie, which Jeyaraj stopped publishing in 1995. In 1993, he was attacked in a parking lot by men with baseball bats and his legs were broken.
"The community thought, 'OK, the journalist has done something bad, so he is punished.' Still the same thinking (today)," said Logendralingam this week, when his Progress Avenue storefront was still covered in plywood.
As for "promoting" Sellathurai and his associates, Logendralingam said he accepted advertisements from them and published profiles of their businesses because they were prominent in the community. "Now there are many divisions in our community, politically. So as a newspaper I cover everything, whatever it is. I can't be partial," he said.
The Canadian Tamil Congress condemned the vandalism at Uthayan hours after it was discovered, saying in a statement "political or other differences cannot be solved by acts of this nature" and that it supports efforts to bring the culprits to justice.
Manjula Selvarajah, a Congress spokesperson, later said Sellathurai and his associates "have every right to do what they did," though many Tamil-Canadians, herself included, wondered why they did it.
International bodies are investigating Rajapaksa on possible war crime charges and the Congress continues to call for a boycott of Sri Lankan products and tourism in Sri Lanka because of the country's poor human rights record, she said. "There were people in the community who weren't happy about this meeting."
The vandalism incident is under investigation by police from Scarborough's 43 Division. Anyone with information is asked to call 416-808-4300.
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