Truce call as 100,000 rally in London Tamil protest

Some 100,000 demonstrators marched through central London yesterday to demand a truce in Sri Lanka, as hundreds staged similar protests in Scandinavia against Colombo's offensive on Tamil rebels.

Waving flags and placards and chanting for a truce, they streamed through the city's main Trafalgar Square en route for Hyde Park, led by a large banner reading 'Britain act now! Immediate and permanent ceasefire in Sri Lanka'.

A spokesman for London's Metropolitan Police told AFP that an estimated 100,000 people were on the march, while three arrests had been made for public order offences.

The Tamil community in Britain numbers about 250,000 to 300,000 and had staged several large protests in London in recent weeks.

About 400 demonstrators gathered outside the Norwegian parliament in Oslo, a day after a similar number protests there, with some of the demonstrators having camped out overnight. In Copenhagen, about 50 demonstrators gathered near the foreign ministry building for a fourth straight day.

"We're calling for an immediate ceasefire, to send food and medicine into the conflict area and to condemn the so-called 'welfare camps', where people are dying and women are getting raped," spokesman Godfrey Manoharan told AFP in Oslo. Sri Lanka's government says it is in the final stages of defeating the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who launched a campaign in 1972 to create a separate Tamil homeland on the Indian Ocean island.

Suren Surendiran, of the British Tamils Forum, which organised the London march, described the situation in Sri Lanka as a "genocide".

"This is about doing something today. The people here have lost direct family members. They are here for a reason. They are worried about their next of kin.

"This is not about a stop-the-war march or anything like that, this is about our own people and our direct family."

He said that Britain, the former colonial power in Sri Lanka and one of the five UN Security Council permanent members, had a "moral obligation" to intervene.

"Our first demand is that we want the government to get a resolution at the UN to implement a ceasefire so that the war can stop," said Surendiran.

"The second demand is to send in humanitarian aid and medical supplies. And the third demand is for independent journalists and international NGOs to be allowed into the area to see directly what is happening.