Category: Political Issues

Around 100,000 Tamils marched through Westminster today to persuade our government to take action over the Sri Lankan genocide of the Tamil population, to shame our media into breaking their silence over what is happening there and to call for the establishment of a Tamil homeland, Tamil Eelam.

Marchers at the Houses of Parliament – with Big Ben

For a second time this month, I felt ashamed of the BBC. Ashamed because I grew up believing that our national broadcasting organisation was the best in the world (and in some ways it still is.)

Of course its first glaring failure this month was the kowtowing of its management to Israel when they decided not to broadcast the Gaza appeal. A second blot on the organisation came today. This evening, fresh home from this massive demonstration in London by Tamils, I turned on Radio 4 for the six o’clock News and found to my amazement that it hadn’t happened. There was not the slightest mention of it. Later I checked the BBC News web page – again nothing.

Probably the largest popular demonstration in the country since the massive anti Iraq war demo in 2003 is news. Between a third and a half of the UK’s Tamil population on the streets in Westminster is news. And certainly the genocide that is taking place in Sri Lanka, with government troops shelling areas packed with civilian refugees is news. But apparently not for the BBC.

Sri Lanka – Background

Sri Lanka is another of Britain’s colonial cockups. When Britain took over Ceylon in 1796 there were separate kingdoms, each with several thousand years of history and which had been treated separately by the Portuguese and Dutch colonists. But in 1833 the British decided to unite the Tamil and Sinhalese areas to make their administration more convenient. And when we got out of India and gave Ceylon its independence in 1948, little if any thought seemed to have been given to the division. The constitution – on a Westminster model – handed the Sinhalese a built-in majority and had no safeguards for the minority Tamils, around 30% of the population.

Most Tamils in Sri Lanka are Hindu, while nearly all the Sinhalese are Buddhist. A considerable minority – over 15% of Tamils are Christian and there are also some Tamil-speaking Muslims, who regard themselves as a separate group from the other Tamils

Within months, the government had deprived more than a million Tamils of their citizenship. These were the descendants of Tamils the British brought from India in 1834 to work their colony – and who joined Ceylon’s Tamils who had lived there for at least 2500 years. Many Tamils were also driven from their homes and replaced by Sinhalese in a deliberate policy to reduce the Tamil domination of key Tamil areas.

The government voted to make Sinhala the official language, with Tamil and English having only a secondary status in 1956, and many Tamils in government employ lost their jobs. A peaceful protest inspired by the example of Ghandi was met by riots encouraged by the government, with police, army and government taking no action to stop the killings.

The last official links with the UK were broken in 1972 when the government declared Ceylon to be a Buddhist republic, Sri Lanka, although it remained a member of the Commonwealth. The setting up of the republic further marginalised the Hindu, Christian and Muslim Tamils.

In 1983 the government took part in a massive pogrom against Tamils which was widely reported in the international media. It was the start of a series of major actions against Tamils that continue to this day, including  bombings, tortures, rape, the assasinations of human rights activists, politicians and aid workers.

The response of the Tamil people was to try and establish a Tamil state, Tamil Eelam, and a key organisation in this has been the Tamil Tigers (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or LTTE.) The LTTE carried out a number of attacks and was for some years in effective control of Tamil areas in the north of the island, setting up banks, courts, social services and other aspects of civil administration in some areas.  This infrastructure has been a major target for the Sri Lankan Army and Air Force with much being destroyed or captured.

The LTTE made headlines across the world with some of its attacks, including a suicide bomb at the country’s major Buddhist temple in 1998 in which 16 people were killed and a raid on the international airport in Colombo which destroyed several aircraft in 2001. But government restrictions on newspapers and journalists mean that they have effective control of the news and most of what happens in the Tamil areas is not reported.

There have been various attempts at peace settlements, particularly since 2000 when Norway became involved as an intermediary. Both sides accuse the other of breaking every agreement made, in particular over agreements to work towards a federal state.

The Sri Lankan Army appears to feel that at last it has the Tamil Tigers on the run and is determined to try and finish them off, whatever the cost in civilian deaths and injuries, bombing and shelling areas where they think the Tigers are hiding and where they know hundreds of thousands of civilians have taken refuge.  Civilians that manage to escape these areas have been put into camps where the world’s press and humanitarian organisations are refused access – and about which we can only presume the worst.

Saturday’s march

Demonstrators dressed in yellow and red get ready to march

But I am only reporting from Westminster, and the massive demonstration there, united in its strength of feeling and dedicated and intense in its demand for an independent Tamil homeland, Tamil Eelam, in the Tamil area of Sri Lanka. Although the chanting was loud and feelings were rightly running high against the atrocities, with street theatre acting out the attacks of the Sri Lankan army on the people and children and adults dressed in bandages and blood (or rather red dye) stained clothing, there seemed little danger of public disorder.

When I arrived around 12.40, the streets from Vauxhall station to the assembly point by the Tate Gallery were already crowded with people and I had a job to push my way through to the front of the march – although fortunately everyone was very polite and helpful (including the stewards and police – this was a march it was a delight to photograph.) It was a march that never really started, but from a little before 2pm slowly edged its way forward in small steps, and by a little after 3pm the front of the march was in Parliament Square.

Marchers outside the Houses of Parliament

Although there are over 50 million Tamils in India and only 3.1 million in Sri Lanka, most of the the UK’s 200,000 or so (estimates range from 150-300,000) come from Sri Lanka as a result of the discrimination and persecution their community has suffered there at least since the 1960s.  Most of them live in London, particularly in East Ham, Walthamstow, Brent, Merton and Croydon. Among the Tamils in the UK are around 2,500 NHS doctors.

Many of the police along the route were in fireproof clothing, and stood clutching fire extinguishers with the pins removed for immediate action. They were not fearing a burning of flags or some incendiary attack on Parliament, but were ready in case some individual attempted to burn themselves to death as a protest. Fortunately they did not need to rush into action.

It was a very slow march up past Parliament, with people stopping at intervals to sit down on the road, to the considerable annoyance of the police, who at times made some pretty ineffectual attempts to speed the march up. But there were so many demonstrators they were powerless; even though the demonstrators generally law-abiding they were determined to have their day and take their time.

Sri Lankan MP, M K Shivaji Lingam (inn brown coat)

Among those marching was at least one Sri Lankan MP, M K Shivaji Lingam of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), who has stated that “it will be impossible to crush or destroy the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) militarily” and that “Hindu culture (in Sri Lanka) is at stake” threatened by the attacks by government forces that have taken over and damaged many Hindu shrines. In December he visited India and obtained the support of several Hindu groups for the Tamil cause.

I left around an hour later, with marchers still streaming past the Houses of Parliament, with the end of the march still coming up Millbank, and Horseferry Road just reopening to traffic. Bringing up the rear was the decorated bus or ‘tiara’ built in Karachi for Dalawar Chaudhry who owns a restaurant in Southall, which as well as its normal extensive decoration had posters calling for an end to the ethnic cleansing and highlighting the killing of politicians and human rights activists in Sri Lanka.

More pictures from the event on My London Diary shortly

Unite against Facism – Woman in rally against the BNP at Dagenham, 2006

Today, 27th January is National Holocaust Memorial Day, which commemorates the tragic loss of life in the genocides of World War II, in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur. The date is the anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

At the foot of the tree

I’m not attending any of the events that take place today, but have taken pictures related to it in the past.  One of the annual ceremonies is held at the Soviet War Memorial in Geraldine Mary Harmsworth park, next to the Imperial War Museum where a small tree was planted in memory of those who perished in the Holocaust 1939-45.

Martin Stern leads the walkers from Cambridge to Downing St

One inspiring man who I met on a number of demonstrations (and photographed) was Leon Greenman, Auschwitz Survivor 98288, born in Whitechapel, who well into his nineties took an active part in campaigning against fascism, both through educational work and through the Anti-Nazi League and Unite Against Fascism, who sadly died last year.  Another survivor was Martin Stern, taken by the Nazis in Holland at the age of five and one of only around a hundred of 15,000 children sent to Terezin to survive, who in 2007 led the Cambridge to London ‘Walk 4 Darfur’, part of the 2007 International Day of Action on Darfur.

Roma were also persecuted and killed by the Nazis, and in 2004 I photographed the March Against Racism on Roma Nation Day, while a few months ago I was with them outside the Italian Embassy in a protest against ethnic cleansing taking place now in Italy.

Around 10,000 people attended a demonstration at the BBC building in central London on Saturday 24 Jan, 2009, in protest against the continuing siege of Gaza and to show their contempt at the partisan decision by the BBC not to broadcast the emergency appeal for Gaza. Protesters marched from a rally there to Trafalgar Square.

I woke this morning to hear Tony Benn being interviewed on Radio 4 about the BBC decision not to broadcast the Disasters Emergency Committee emergency appeal for humanitarian aid for Gaza. Taken on the spurious grounds of ‘impartiality’, it is a decision that is clearly partisan, placing the Corporation firmly on the side of the government of Israel and their sick fiction that there is no humanitarian crisis there.

I was delighted to be able to congratulate him on this performance in person as he sat outside Broadcasting House. In the interview he gave the details of the DEC appeal on air (see below), and he told me he had repeated this in BBC TV News interview. He also told me that the whole Today programme studio had been on his side, against the decision taken by the BBC hierarchy.

If you missed his contribution you can hear it again on the BBC web site. He tells people they can make cheques payable to the ‘Disaster Emergency committee Gaza Crisis’ and send them to PO Box 999, London EC3A 3AA, or go to any Post Office and make a payment quoting Freepay Number 1210. You can also go to the DEC web site and make a contribution,

Later the Today programme broadcast Caroline Thomson, one of the BBC bosses attempting to justify the decision. Frankly what she said was appalling and my immediate response was to log on to my computer and send my complaint to the BBC. You can hear her on the Today site, as well as International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander who asked the BBC to think again.

Tony Benn leads a small group into Broadcasting House to deliver a letter of protest

After a short press conference outside Broadcasting House, Tony Benn led others into the BBC building to deliver a letter of protest. Around 20 people entered and then a policeman stood in front of me and prevented me from following them. But they soon came out and  moved up the road to where the rally was to take place. Police pushed a number of demonstrators who wanted to continue to demonstrate outside the BBC across the road away from the building, and tempers got a little raised, but there was no real violence.

Speaker after speaker denounced the BBC decision and called on them to change their mind, and there was considerable cheering when it was announced that other broadcasters had decided to run the appeal. Benn in his speech forecast that the pressure on the BBC which was coming from all sections of the community would soon force them to change their mind.

The demonstration had been planned long before the DEC appeal became an issue, and the starting point at Broadcasting House was chosen to draw attention to the lack of honest and unbiased coverage of the Israeli attack on Gaza by the BBC. This was not  the fault of the many journalists who – in so far as the Israeli press ban had allowed – had worked as well as they could, but an institutional bias, in part resulting from the same kind of misapplication of the idea of impartiality that led them to the ridiculous decision over the DEC appeal. The demonstrations main aims, also reflected in the speeches at the rally were to call for an end to the blockade of Gaza, for a stop on arms sales to Israel and for the Israeli war criminals to be brought to justice.

The rally overran and the march proceeded to Trafalgar Square directly rather than as had originally been planned going past Downing Street, and shoes were thrown on the road outside the BBC rather than there. A few people were arrested for obstructing the police as the march reached Piccadilly Circus, and stewards halted the march, apparently demanding that those arrested should be released before they went on. But after around ten minutes the march moved on anyway to a final rally at Trafalgar Square. As this got under way I left, walking past many police vans parked around the square and in Whitehall. There had been a very strong police presence throughout.

At home I read the Press Association report of the demonstration. Ridiculously it stated there had been 400 demonstrators at the BBC, and I think this was the figure used in the BBC news I heard at 6pm. On their web site the BBC now says 2,000. The report on Sky quotes a police estimate of 5,000 – which would normally mean there were 10,000 on the march. It would seem that the PA reporter only looked at the few people on the pavement outside the BBC for what was essentially a press conference (the police wouldn’t allow demonstrators to remain there) and ignored – or didn’t notice  – the thousands across the road.

Police clear demonstrators away from Broadcasting House

More pictures on My London Diary

I’m not sure why, at least according to the BBC, celebrations for the ‘Grand Old Man’ of Victorian politics, William Ewart Gladstone (29 Dec 1809 – 19 May 1898) should be launched today, but his was a story linked with Bow, where I went on Sunday for the Three Mills Loop guided walk, which takes place roughly monthly.

The first half of the walk took us from the mills through the centre of the Olympic site on the Northern Outfall Sewer (rebranded in the 1990s as the ‘Greenway’) and then along the Navigation tow-path to Hackney Wick, where we turned down the Hertford Union canal, crossing this to go down Parnell Road. Here, where the walk leader went into the newsagents to buy an ice-cream, we were close to a part of the story linked to Gladstone, although the statue comes later.

Further on we passed Bow’s most famous factory, the former Bryant & May match works, set up by two Quaker businessmen in 1861. It’s a fine brick building, now a gated yuppie ‘village’, but was notorious in the 1880s for its low pay, poor working conditions and “phossy jaw” a disfiguring disease that led to early death for many of the young women workers caused by the white phosphorus used to cut the cost of making matches. It earned its place in labour history when Annie Besant went there and organised the Match Girls’ Strike in 1888, winning better working conditions and more pay.

But it was really the Salvation Army that changed the match industry, with William Booth buying up an empty factory close to that ice-cream shop in Lamprell Street and making ‘Lights in Darkest England‘ safety matches which used the more expensive red phosphorus in place of the cheaper but highly dangerous white allotrope.  Booth also paid his workers more and gave them safer and better working conditions  – including tea-making facilities. He promoted these matches through the cooperative movement and also with consumer power, harnessed by the ‘British Match Consumers League’ which he set up, urging members to harass their shopkeepers at least twice a week until they sold the army matches.

It was this campaign that forced the other match manufacturers to switch to the safer red phosphorus and in 1901 Booth was able to close the factory having virtually eliminated the problem, although it took another seven years before the use of white phosphorus in matches was made illegal at the end of 1908. And yes, it’s that same material as Israeli forces have been caught using illegally in densely populated areas of Gaza.

In 1871, Gladstone’s chancellor decided to impose a tax on matches, and there was a public outcry. Although the government went as far as actually producing 1/2d tax stamps with the catchy motto “ex luce lucellum” (from light a little gain) pressure from campaigners (including the Queen herself) led to the proposal being dropped. The match workers from Bow took part (urged by their employer who had threated to pass the tax on to them) in a massive march to Parliament, which although described by some as “entirely peaceful” actually involved some massive and brutal brawls with the police in Trafalgar Square and on the Embankment.

After the proposal was dropped, Bryant and May celebrated with the erection of an ornate drinking fountain in 1872 opposite Bow Road Station (it disappeared when the road was widened in 1953, but a small plaque marks the site) but the workers were less happy when the management docked their wages to pay for it. On the day it was unveiled some of the women slashed their arms in protest, dripping the blood onto the fountain.

It was Annie Besant who got this story mixed up with the statue of Gladstone shown here, sculpted by Albert Bruce-Joy and donated by Theodore H Bryant in 1882, and it seems unlikely that workers either had their pay docked or celebrated its erection with their blood. But in 1988, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the strike, the Gladstone statue was daubed with red paint. After the council cleaned it, someone came back and daubed it again, and you can still see it now on the plinth of the statue and also on the hands in this picture.

There is a good illustrated account covering some of the above and other relevant local history on the Kingsley Hall web site.

More pictures from the walk on My London Diary.

I’m not sure that this is the picture that MP John McDonnell would want to put on his election leaflets, but it did amuse me – and some of his constituents who were there with him at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 to voice their opposition to the expansion of the airport and in particular the building of another runway – the so called ‘third runway’ which will go through their village and mean they are forced out of their homes.

I don’t like airports. I grew up under the flightpath to the main runway (I think in those days it had five runways, but they abandoned some and built a terminal on another) with planes passing over just out of reach, and for a while was a keen aircraft spotter writing down their numbers in my book. They weren’t hard to spot – you needed to look through the wrong end of binoculars to see the whole plane.

Seeing some going over with flames from the engines led to nightmares but fortunately I think it was only in these dreams that I saw and heard them crash.  But back in those days of the Brabazon and Comet, aviation was a brave and exciting new frontier and I was caught up in its glamour, thrilling in visits to the airport where my oldest brother worked and I actually got to go in a plane, and later with him to the Fanrborough air show.

But when I grew up I studied science and became interested in the environment, and even over 40 years ago it was obvious that we had to do something about airports and air travel – and now you have to really stick your head in the sand not to believe it.

Last week’s announcement approving the expansion of Heathrow and the building of a third runway from transport minister Geoff Hoon came as a shock – how can any government be so stupid?   But the protesters who came to Heathrow’s T5 on Saturday are determined to keep up the campaign to stop it, and it seems more than likely it will never be built.

For the planet’s sake I hope it isn’t.

More pictures on My London Diary, where you can also see pictures from last year’s flashmob at the Department of Transport and march at Heathrow, the 2003 march against the Third Runway and more.

The British branch of the Islamic movement Hizb ut-Tahrir were also demonstrating in London last weekend over Gaza, but their attention was as much on the corrupt Arab regimes as the Israeli aggressors. They call for an end to the various dynasties and dictatorships set up as western puppets in the Middle East and a return to an Islamic caliphate as established in the early years of Islam.

They also call for the Muslim armies to go to the support of the Palestinian people, and visited the embassies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria to pour shame on them for colluding with the attacks on fellow Muslims.

As expected, this demonstration was highly organised and kept in order by the stewards and there was really very little need for the police other than to direct traffic.

I’ve had a busy week doing odd jobs and have got a little behind with putting my work on the web and writing blog posts. Last end was a busy one, and I’m only just catching up with things.

Gaza of course is still very much on all our minds, and on Saturday and Sunday I photographed two very different demonstrations. The first was the huge national demonstration in London on Saturday, when perhaps a hundred thousand marched from Hyde Park to the Israeli Embassy.

Part of the reason why things got rather out of hand around the Israeli embassy has to be the lack of planning by the police for the numbers involved. It’s one thing to issue derisively low estimates of those taking part in marches, but quite another to base the policing on similarly ridiculous figures, and make it physically very difficult for the march to actually get past the likely flashpoint.

When the front of the march reached the southern gates close to the embassy, apparently there were still people leaving the assembly point near Speakers Corner a mile and a half behind, with the mainly wide roads between fairly densely packed with people.

Obviously people would stop – at least for some minutes – close to the embassy, and using barriers to narrow the road there more or less brought the march to a halt. Trouble started both at this point and at the northern entrance to the road containing the embassy, where demonstrators thought the march had been halted by police and started to get angry.

March stewards got angry too, and I was assaulted by several of them while attempting to photograph the front of the march. But I went home early as I had a party to photograph in the evening, and the demonstration continued for several hours after it had been expected to finish. More about the event and of course more pictures on My London Diary.