'Most human beings have an infinite capacity for taking things for granted' Aldous Huxley

Colin Barrow, Leader of Westminster City Council, is angry. Whilst he's happy to back legitimate protest, the 'vociferous minority' of Tamils who have made Parliament Square a 'no go area for law abiding people' are a different matter. They're 'disrupting the life of London' - and Colin will back the police in having them removed (see letter to the Times, 15th May).

About 45 people were arrested during the most recent 'sit-in' around the Houses of Parliament on 11th May - almost all of them for 'wilful obstruction' of the road.

We close London's roads quite often: for ceremonies, for commemorations, for marathons, for bike races, for laying water pipes, for filling pot holes and for visiting politicians and dignitaries. Sometimes it's an inconvenience - but life goes on: human ingenuity steps in, and people find a different route to wherever they're going. In the case of the Tamil protests, those travelling by foot or bike might even make the bold decision to simply walk amongst (or around) the peaceful protesters sitting in the road. There is nothing about Parliament Square that makes it a 'no go area'.

Image by Steve Punter

The people who closed the roads have friends and relatives trapped in an area of land that is roughly a mile square (that's a little over ten times the size of Parliament Square -or about the size of New York's Central Park). But there aren't five hundred people in this space, or even five thousand; there's between fifty and a hundred thousand people - living in make-shift shelters and without adequate food, water or sanitation. More accurate estimates of the number of people trapped are impossible, because no journalists, aid workers or foreign officials can reach them - because it's a war zone. The UN's most cautious estimates put the number of civilians killed at eight thousand - in the words of British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, it is 'as close to hell as you can get'. To understate the situation somewhat, this is a 'no go area'.

That the few thousand Tamils who have been protesting outside parliament for the past month are 'vociferous', and that they are a minority, does not diminish their cause or their legitimacy - nor should it be a reason to undermine their right to peaceful protest.

 

Image by Jessicamulley

For those of us lucky enough to live in the comfort zone of the industrialised world, where hunger, poverty and war are a distant problem for most, the faceless and anonymous victims of a conflict several thousand miles away are usually easy to ignore. But for the tens of thousands of people with friends and family currently beyond reach - displaced from their homes, perhaps killed, perhaps trapped between the warring factions, or perhaps struggling to survive along with the two hundred thousand others now driven into refugee camps - ignoring the situation in Sri Lanka is not so easy. Rather than criticising their 'lengthy' protests, maybe we should ask: why don't we care? 

Maybe you do care, and you're able to imagine what your response might be if your mother, or brother, or aunty or children - or your entire family - were currently trapped beyond reach on a small stretch of land where the UN was predicting an 'inevitable bloodbath'. Vociferous suddenly doesn't seem so unreasonable. And the roads suddenly don't seem so important.