Hidden tiger
Updated Saturday 18 April
Tuesday 14 April, 6pm:
Down at parliament square, a small marquee has been pitched - probably less than 300m from the place where our mighty prime minister and his various hangers-on bitch about the consequences of hiring Derek Draper and other vital matters of state, etc.
A young man called Prarameswaran Subramaniyam sits at the back of the marquee, wrapped in a pile of blankets. Subramaniyam is 28 and a Tamil. He's in the eighth day of a hunger strike that he hopes will draw world attention to the plight of Tamil civilians being slaughtered by the Sri Lankan government in northern Sri Lanka - the latest awful chapter in the famously horrific 60-year-old conflict between Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority (although it's older than that: Tamils at this protest are quick to point out that their persecution predates Sri Lanka's 1948 independence from Britain by many years).
Anyway - the publicity returns of Subramaniyam's hunger strike remained disappointing at the time of writing. The protestors have yet to be offered a substantive UK government statement on the conflict, and - apart from a handful of reports last week when Tamil protestors occupied Westminster bridge at rush hour and started chucking themselves into the Thames - mainstream journalism has managed to ignore the fact of this loud eight-day-old protest almost entirely. Alas for UK Tamils, mainstream journalism has been at full stretch on important topics such as measuring the gap between Susan Boyle's looks and talent, and probing Dolly and Damian McBride.
The point I want to make, though, is that avoiding this protest actually takes quite a lot of effort if you're in the Westminster area. It's been difficult to physically circumvent for days, and even weeks (UK Tamils first took their protest about Sri Lankan government attacks on Tamils in northern Sri Lanka to the streets in February. They began their occupation of parliament square last week). The fact that the UK government, the mainstream media and even the Met (to an extent) have been able, largely, to avoid the whole event is a kind of salute to the mainstream's collective ability to turn a blind eye to the woes of dark-skinned citizens, even when they're screaming their heads off right in the middle of us.
Outside the tent which houses Subramaniyam, hundreds of Tamil protestors chant and wave signs. They're also being kettled by the police (not sure that news of the Met's new go-slow on kettling has reached the cops at Westminster) into a too-small area on the right flank of parliament square - men and women, elderly men and women, teenagers, babies, and lots of little kids.
The action shows absolutely no signs of losing momentum - I pass hundreds of British Tamil protestors in parliament square on my way home from work every evening, and see more and more flags and signs tied to the parliament square railings every morning on my way in. Brian Haw's small camp has almost disappeared behind them.
I find it interesting in this paranoid day and age that so many people can scream a grievance at parliament for so long and get such a muted media and political response. The protestors can't believe it either - 'for what we've done, I don't think the response is what people expected,' says student protestor and organiser Janani Paramsothy. The original Tamil protests weren't even legal - as most people know, protesting in parliament square in the SOCPA era is a form filling nightmare that tends to end badly if you don't get it right - and yet, these guys carry on.
Perhaps they picked the wrong week to make their point - and not just because parliament's on holiday. Parliament may lie just a few hundred metres from here, but alas - all anybody associated with it wants to talk about is the voltage in Mad Nad's' ladyshave. Perhaps the problem is purely technical - maybe none of our political notables can bring themselves to look out the car window during the ride to work these days. Maybe they just spend the whole trip on the floor in the crash position. Perhaps they back the Tamil Tigers. Perhaps they're selling arms to the Sri Lankan government. Who can really say?
Anyway - Subramaniyam. He has started taking water today, but looks weak, bleary-eyed and a lot younger than 28. He has the rancid breath that people develop on a fast. He tells me that he plans to stay on the hunger strike 'until I get answers to all of our demands.'
That is proving difficult. The protestors' demands seem simple, but are ambitious - especially in this political climate. Aimed at Gordon Brown and UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, the demands include an immediate ceasefire in northern Sri Lanka, the transport of medical aid to Tamil civilians trapped by government forces, and - probably the fatal sticking point for most administrations - negotiations with representatives of the banned Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE).
That's not to say, says Paramsothy, that the Westminster action is an attempt to use the northern war to legitimise the LTTE: she says it's incorrect - and a play into the Sri Lankan government's hands - to paint the protest as opportune. Some protestors chant their support for the Tamil Tigers, and they don't hide that, but 'we're doing it [the protest action] for the people first. After they have saved the people, they can talk about the LTTE.'
'We need the UN to help us achieve an immediate ceasefire,' says student Yalini Naguleashwaran. 'Gordon Brown is in a position to help the UN do that. We are people from this country - who else are we meant to turn to?' Naguleashwaran says the protestors won't leave parliament square until they get the right result.
The first aim, though, says Paramsothy, is to get a hearing from someone who counts. As I say, it's been a challenge to find a worthy's ear.
'On the very first day [when the group occupied Westminster bridge], we said we would go if the prime minister spoke to us. That wasn't possible, so we said give us a cabinet minister. That wasn't possible, so just two MPs came out to speak to us. We have to go on a hunger strike, or block up a bridge to get anyone to talk to us,' and even those actions haven't paid off as well as the protestors hoped.
Paramsothy says Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes has been relatively useful - he's trying to arrange groups of students to address the security council, visit Hillary Clinton's office, and talk to people at the EU. (There have been short reports in the mainstream press of David Miliband talking to Sri Lankan ministers, and of Des Browne taking an appointment as an envoy in the crisis).
Paramsothy, Naguleashwaran and Subramaniyam want more, and say they're staying here until they get it.
'We could go to these places (the UN, Brussels and Washington) and they'll say "thanks for coming - there's nothing we can do,"' Paramsothy says. She points at Subramaniyam. 'He's going to still be on a hunger strike, and there are ten other boys who said they will also go on a hunger strike if anything happens to him.'
Something will have to give, then, and it may be the relationship with the police.
'There have been a couple of scuffles with the police already,' Naguleashwaran says, as more and more people squeeze behind the barricades down this side of the square. 'Obviously, there is more people here than we can fit in. The police have barricaded us out of the grass area [in the centre of the square], because they were worried about the grass [being damaged]. People aren't very happy about that. We're trying our best to keep it peaceful.'
Wonder if they'll manage it. There are hundreds of people occupying the square, and they've been here for a while.
Wednesday 15 April: just been past the square again and everyone's still there. Will go down again tomorrow and see if things have changed at all.
Thursday 16 April: everyone is still there.
Friday 17 April:
I go to parliament square in a pouring rain to see what people think of the BBC's report that British Tamil Association founder Arunachalam Chrishanthakumar, 52, has been convicted supplying bomb-making equipment for the Tamil Tigers. As soon as I arrive, I find out. I can hear protestors chanting "BBC - tell the truth! BBC - tell the truth!"
The weather is terrible, but there are still hundreds of people here. In the marquee, Subramaniyam is not sitting on the chair anymore - into the 12th day of his hunger strike, he is lying very still on a mattress. The people around him say that he's stopped taking water, and is under medical supervision. The mood is not quite as upbeat as it was earlier in the week.
Paramsothy is scathing about the BBC's priorities. 'The BBC - they tend not to cover things that we're doing like this [protest].
'We're not interested in following that kind of story,' another young protestor tells me (he gives me his name and allows me to record his statements, but asks me not to publish his name online - there have been reports of Sri Lanka government thugs attacking Tamil protestors at these pro-Tamil independence demonstrations around the world. He and Paramsothy tell me that Tamils who have spoken publicly have also been threatened through facebook and other forums). 'The reason we're here [demonstrating in parliament square] is that this is a democratic country and we can protest here... if we went home, we'd probably be shot.'
Paramsothy is furious at the UK government's response thus far - particularly its response to the LTTE (she mentions David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner's joint statement calling for the LTTE to lay down its arms), and what she perceives as a deliberate international misunderstanding of the LTTE's motives and militancy. Like many people here, she and the young man I'm talking to see the LTTE's own terrorist history unequivocally as a response to Sinhalese aggression.
'We just think - for god's sake, they are political... they have this frankly stupid view that we have this group of people [the LTTE] who just decided - oh, we're just going to bomb something today. They were political for a number of years when they were being brutally crushed [by the Sri Lankan government]. They only increased their militancy and their violence up until now because of what the SLA and the Sri Lankan government have done to them...'
They're both also incensed at reports that the LTTE is using Tamil civilians in northern Sri Lanka as human shields: Paramsothy says the truth is civilians want the LTTE to shield them from Sri Lankan government attacks - they're using the LTTE for protection.
'The fact is that half of the people [Tamil civilians] are refugees from army controlled areas... the alternative is a prison camps where the girls would probably be gang raped and the guys would probably be shot as terrorists.'
The problem at this end continues to be the lack of political and media interest: 'Some MPS have come over to talk to us,' Paramsothy says. 'Some have said there is no point to this - give it up. Some say we really support what you're doing. I think all they're doing is increasing the frustration and the desperation.'
'There have been a lot of people saying - well, why are they [the protestors] here [in parliament square]?' the young man says. 'They should just go to Sri Lanka and protest, and all those kind of things.'
He says again that he's protesting in London because he is British, and because protest is still acceptable in the UK in a way that it isn't in Sri Lanka. 'We couldn't go home. We'd be shot... our families came to live here to escape [the conflict and life as Sri Lanka's minority group].'
Paramsothy says that Subramanyam 'is prepared to die,' and that protestors and doctors have 'been debating all the laws' about letting someone die on a hunger strike. She says it doesn't matter, either way - 'he wrote a letter before he started the hunger strike saying he didn't want to be resuscitated,' and that if he's revived, 'he'll just come back and continue it.'
