The largest coalition of Tamil youth groups and university Tamil Student Associations in Canada - the Canadian Tamil Youth Alliance (CTYA) has called for the removal of the military from the Tamil populated areas of the North-East.

In a statement released on Friday, along side their British Tamil counterparts, the CTYA coalition said,

'Canadian Tamil Youth Alliance (CTYA) condemns the Sri Lankan military’s use of scare tactics in an effort to prevent students from freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. CTYA further vehemently condemns the unjustifiable attacks made by the Sri Lankan military on the Jaffna University students.

“It’s quite disheartening to see that a so called democratic country is actively restricting the freedoms and basic rights of citizens. As our Canadian government has mentioned during several occasions, military should not be present in civilian activities at all,” said Tharchini Vallepuram, a Director of CTYA.

As Tamil youth, we stand in solidarity with the Jaffna University students in demanding that their rights and freedoms are upheld. We also stress that the safety and security of these students should not be undermined or endangered.

 The Tamil Remembrance Day is a distinctive day on which Tamil people pay their respect to their heroes all over the world. To deprive the people from partaking in mourning and remembering is inhumane to any civil society. The Sri Lankan government’s relentless way of preventing such practices of remembrance from taking place blatantly reaffirms the government’s commitment on having dogmatic control over the activities of the Tamil people. In essence, like the burning of the Jaffna library in 1981, this is another form of abolishing Tamil history as the government tries to play an active role in ensuring that remembrance ceremonies do not take place.'

See here for full statement.