Here is an easy way to work out if the left is taking an issue seriously. If the largest single group at a meeting of a couple of hundred people is Socialist Resistance you can be pretty that the vanguard is not that interested. The three of us who were at tonight’s meeting called by the Tamil Legal Advocacy Project (TLAP) were, as far as I could make out, the only left presence other than Steve from Workers Power. The vast bulk of the audience was London based Tamils.

The top table comprised Yolanda Foster of Amnesty International, Thomas Hughes of International Media Support (IMS), Michelle Butler of lawyers Matrix Chambers and Lutz Marten who specialises in international law. Toby Boutle  a Conservative parliamentary  candidate also spoke briefly. Yolanda gave a lot of distressing detail about the hundreds of thousands of Tamils being detained in camps without adequate sanitation, water or shelter. Families are separated and Amnesty has grave concerns about what she euphemistically called “gender based violence”. The camps are controlled by the Sri Lankan army which has a well established record of extra judicial murder, execution of prisoners and indiscriminate shelling of civilians. Her suggestions for action were signing Amnesty’s petition and writing to your MP.

Thomas Hughes’ organisation is funded by a few Scandinavian foreign ministries. Boundless optimism seems to be a requirement for working with IMS. They went to Sri Lanka thinking that they could have a dialogue with the government on press freedom in a country where the president rings editors to tell them what to put in the paper. IMS estimates that eleven journalists have been murdered or disappeared in the last two years. Three Tamil journalists were murdered on International Press Freedom Day. Thomas managed to rile comrade Fred by seeming to put an equals sign between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan state.

By contrast the legal profession gets off lightly. Michelle Butler reported large scale intimidation of lawyers, including burning down houses and offices but there have been no murders. Though her faith in the reforming zeal of the new chief justice struck me as touchingly naive given that she’d just described how venal his predecessor had been.

Lutz Marten’s contribution ran through the options available under international law. I rather lost the thread here but the gist was that there was not too much that could be done about Sri Lanka’s war criminals. At this point some loony Trot with a Belfast accent chipped in suggesting a boycott campaign of tour companies going to Sri Lanka, getting support from political parties like Labour and Respect, involving trade unions in defending the rights of Tamils in addition to all the legal business. These ideas were quite well received and from some of the conversations at the end of the meeting it is pretty likely that we’ll be seeing some action in this area quite soon.

Kay Phillips, Respect’s chair sent greetings to the meeting which through a mishap were not read out. Her statement is below.

As a supporter of the right of the Tamil people to self determination and as national chair of the RESPECT Party, I send fraternal greetings to this meeting.

RESPECT members were horrified by the Sri Lankan army’s massacre of Tamil civilians and the summary execution of Tamil fighters.

We support the call for the immediate opening of the internment camps to international observers.

We support the demand for the immediate release of all those who are currently being held illegally and we extend our support to those in Sri Lanka and abroad who defend the right of the Tamil people to live free from terror and persecution.
             Yours in solidarity.
                   Dr Kay Phillips