British Tamils staged a civil disobedience protest on Monday night on Westminster Bridge. The protest was a spontaneous response, organised by text message, to the news that the Sri Lankan government had used chemical weapons on Tamil civilians at Bhuthukudiyrup in Mulaithivu, killing one and a half thousand people. The NGO War Without Witness has confirmed that mustard gas was used in the attack. Journalists, aid agencies, human rights monitoring groups and the United Nations are all barred by the Sri Lankan government from entering the conflict zone. The mainstream media did, for the first time, provide some coverage of the protest, but has not mentioned the reason for it. Many hundreds of Tamil families, having been moved forcibly from Westminster Bridge by the Metropolitan Police, are now camped out on Parliament Square in an illegal protest, which they are determined to continue until the British Government takes its supposed support for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire to the United Nations Security Council.
One protester, a student in London, said that the civil disobedience protest was an act of desperation on the part of the British Tamil community, whose legal protest campaign against daily acts of mass killing of civilians by the Sri Lankan government has been completely ignored by British media and society. He said that:
“A couple of months ago there was a protest march in London attended by over 125,000 people, which was completely ignored by the media”.
The police moved against the civil disobedience protest in the early hours of the morning, ringing the protesters and squeezing them together. They then began to attack some protesters with batons and drag people along the ground. The rest of the group, which included families with young children, then moved onto Parliament Square of their own accord. Several people were arrested under the prevention of terrorism act for carrying the Tamil national flag, which is also the flag of the Tamil Tigers – a proscribed organisation in the UK.
The protesters were still displaying Tamil flags on Tuesday, but had placed them at the centre of the protest for protection. The atmosphere at the protest at Parliament Square was tense. The Square was surrounded by riot police and vans. On one occasion the crowd stood up in unison in fear that the police were about to close in on them again.
Many of the protesters have lost family members in Sri Lanka since January. Rathika, an A-level student, said that she had lost seven members of her family and that seventeen had been wounded. She reflected the general sentiment at the protest when she asserted:
“We’re not going to finish this protest until there is a ceasefire”.
Such is the level of desperation and frustration in the British Tamil community that many are now willing to sacrifice their education, their livelihoods, their own physical safety, and if necessary to break the law non-violently, to draw attention to the plight of their people in Sri Lanka.

Context for the new protest campaign

James Ross, the legal and policy director at Human Rights Watch, has said of the Sri Lankan government’s recent military campaign in north-east Sri Lanka:
“This ‘war’ against civilians must stop...Sri Lankan forces are shelling hospitals and so-called safe zones and slaughtering the civilians there”.
The most recent, and so far most deadly, attack by the Sri Lankan government, to which the Monday night civil disobedience protest was a response, was itself within the so-called ‘safe-zone’. Over three thousand Tamil civilians have been killed by the Sri Lankan army since January. Over seven thousand civilians have been killed since 2005. Most of these deaths have been extra-judicial killings in areas controlled by the Sri Lankan government.
British Tamils stress that the unwillingness of civilians in Tamil Tiger controlled areas in north eastern Sri Lanka to leave, which the British media has attributed exclusively to Tamil Tiger threats against those who attempt to leave, must be seen in the context of widespread human rights abuses in the government controlled areas.
The ultimate fear of Tamils, both in Sri Lanka and in the diaspora, is that with the defeat of the Tamil Tigers, northern Sri Lanka will become ‘another Tibet’, with the Tamils progressively displaced and poor Sinhalese settlers moved in from the south. Sinhalese has been the only acknowledged official language in Sri Lanka since 1956. In 1981 government ministers oversaw the destruction by fire of the second-biggest library in South Asia, the Jaffna library, which had contained ninety-five thousand Tamil books. The current civilian death toll is merely one in a long line of mass killings of Tamil civilians – thousands were also killed in 1956, 1958, 1977, 1981 and 1983. The Tamil Tigers only gained significant support in 1983, in the aftermath of the government orchestrated mass pogroms against Tamils of that year. The Tamil Tigers have themselves committed atrocities since 1983, but it is estimated that the Sri Lankan government has caused about twenty times as many civilian deaths.