Tamil Appeal Parliament Square

Notes from the Tamil Demonstration in Parliament Square, Monday 20 April 2009

At this distance there was just the shrill and incomprehesible voice of a woman cheer-leading by megaphone broadcast piercing down Whitehall




Tamil Tiger flag	Independent since 1948	The incomprehensible voice

During the British colonial era indentured labour was imported from Tamil Nadu for labour in the tea, coffee, coconuts and rubber plantation economy. The harbour of Trincomalee was important in WWII in defeating the Japanese expansion and Ceylon had coaling and provisioning ports for the Royal Navy at Colombo during the 1880s and the Third Burma War. In giving independence in 1948 the government was handed over to the Sinhalese majority denying the Tamil minority their wish for an independent homeland. Now a Tamil named Subramanyam Parameswaran has started a hunger strike in Parliament Square, London, starting on 7 April 2009.

I spoke with a Sri Lankan Tamil carpenter presently working in London. He believed that the Indian government was selling arms to the Sri Lankan government with weapons and CS gas, he used the words 'chemical weapons', to kill Tamils in Sri Lanka. The civilian deaths of women and children, as well as men, are depicted chillingly on the posters.

The island of Ceylon has had a British era and before that a Portuguese and Dutch era. There is a long history of settlement by Hindus and Buddhists before the European colonists.