‘I’M THE best friend of Parameswaran Subramaniyan,’ 22-year-old Tharmini Tharmaraja told News Line on the edge of Westminster Green yesterday.
Hundreds were demonstrating opposite the House of Commons, keeping up loud chants of ‘Ceasefire Now!’ and ‘Tamil Tigers Freedom Fighters!’, while the brave young hunger striker was lying under canvas alongside them, semi-conscious.
Tharmini continued: ‘I can tell you about Parameswaran’s medical condition, his energy is going down and he’s very vulnerable to infection.
‘We are forcing him to take water every four hours, but he just sips, he hasn’t eaten for eight days.’
Satkunaraja, another friend of Parameswaran, said: ‘In 1947 the British government handed Sri Lanka over to the Sinhalese and since then the Tamil people have been oppressed.
‘But recently it’s got so much worse. Last week 1,457 people were killed by chemical weapons, dropped by the Sri Lankan Army.’
Janani Paramsothy, an 18-year-old school student from East Ham and a spokeswoman for British Tamil Students, said: ‘The police are trying to restrict this demonstration to 50 people, but people can’t be stopped from coming here to protest at the genocide in Sri Lanka.
‘There are maybe 400 here now, at 3pm, but there will be double that in a couple of hours, by late afternoon.
‘Although Rajapakse called a 48-hour ceasefire the day before yesterday 237 people were killed by the SLA yesterday.
‘It’s come to a point that the British trade unions must get involved. They have to take action against the genocide.
‘Young people are leading this protest, but we feel the government is patronising us. The trade unions have to do something.’
