Tamil student continues on hunger strike protest

A Sri Lankan student is in his third week of a hunger strike in Parliament Square, as Tamil protesters continue to disrupt the streets of the capital.

Thousands of Tamils have joined 28 year old Subramaniyam Paramestvaran in urging the British government to apply more pressure on the Sri Lankan government to seek a peaceful end to the conflict.

Suren Surendiran, of the British Tamils Forum, explained: "As British citizens, they want the UK government to act. Rather than just calling for a ceasefire, they should go to the UN security council to demand one."

More than 100,000 civilians have been displaced from the formally Tamil Tiger-held area in the north-east, pouring out into government-controlled ‘safe zones’ after the government intensified their effort to defeat the outlawed group.

However, aid agencies have said that an unknown number of citizens remain trapped in the shrinking area of land held by by the Tigers.

Mr Surendiran said: "These are people who have relatives and friends in Sri Lanka; people who have lost brothers and fathers and sisters."

Mr Paramestvaran, who is resting in a tent outside Westminister, has been told that serious damage could be done to his health if he carries on.

Dr Sellappah Nallanathar, a Sri Lankan, of St.Peter's hospital in Surrey, has been checking on his countrymen regularly. He said: "I'm asking him to take small sips of water and it's the water that is keeping him going. If he doesn't wan to take food, we can't force him. He's determined to carry on."

The government also claims that there are only 300 to 400 rebels left, confined to a five square-mile area. Tamil Tiger leaders have been urging their troops to swallow their cyanide capsules and take their own lives, rather than surrender.

Military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara stated that over 3,000 rebels had surrendered since January 2009. The government and the Tamil Tigers are giving, typically, conflicting accounts of the facts at hand; the National newspapers claims that the army has rescued over 170,000 civilians who “blame the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam, for their plight and harassment”.

However, TamilNet, a news website sympathetic to the rebel cause, alleges that there are almost 200,000 civilians left that are seeking refuge with the rebels, moving from Valaignar Madam to Mu’l’li-vaaykkaal.

The US State Department has asserted that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE) since its conception has not adhered to the standards of conduct expected of a ‘resistance movement’ – the LTTE is guilty of high-profile assassinations, including that of a Sri Lankan president, several ministers of parliament and Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, recruiting child-soldiers, inclduing somes orphaned by the tsunami.

The Sri Lankan government has also been under fire for a list of human-rights violations. The suppression of independent, impartial media has led to allegations that human rights abuses to go unnoticed.

While foreign journalists and local correspondents that are not employed by the government are not allowed in the war zone, any other media coverage of the war has been stifled through threats, government-imposed restrictions and violence.

Amnesty International claims that at least 10 media workers have been killed since the beginning of 2006. In January, Lasantha Wickrematunge, one of Sri Lanka’s leading journalists and outspoken critics of the government, was gunned shot in broad daylight.

Since 1983, over 70,000 have been officially listed as killed in the conflict, although the real number of casualties will likely never be ascertained, as both sides, it is widely accepted, manipulate the figures before they are released.