Tamil youth came to the forefront, organizing and leading the protests across the globe. And both the face of protest and the method of organization are reflecting this new reality.
In London, the sit-in in front of the British parliament was organized mainly by youth, utilizing the technology of the twentieth-first century.
This followed on the 120,000 people march held on 31 January, which also saw unprecedented numbers of younger Tamils take to the streets of central London.
When a protest is organized, text messages are sent out virally, from each phone to ten or twenty other contacts. Notices go out on Facebook pages and MySpace sites. Emails are forwarded from one concerned Tamil to another.
All these communications set out location, date and time of the protest. But then it is left to the individual Tamil to both make the decision to come and also to determine what placard they will carry and what slogans they will shout.
Similarly, those who thought to bring their own loud-hailers (again mainly the second and third generation Tamil youth) lead the chants and slogans and other protestors follow.
This change in both the instigators and the participants in seen in the increasingly younger faces pictured on Tamil websites and newspapers – and now increasingly speaking to the mainstream press as well.
As with the protestors, most of the hunger strikers across the globe are also young, mainly under 30. This includes the two in London, Sivatharsan Sivakumaravel, 21 and Parameswarn Subramaniyan, 28, both students from south London.
“This generational change will have consequences for the countries in which the Tamil Diaspora live,” noted one participant at a rally in the UK. “It means that unless a solution is found, this is going to be a long lasting issue in these countries.”
“It also means that there will be voices for the Tamil cause long after I am gone,” said another marcher, pointing to his 15-year-old daughter who was marching with a group of her friends, carrying the Tamil flag.
The younger Tamils stepping forward to more vocally express their concerns often speak with broad accents from across Britain. They sound British and demand their rights as British citizens, but see no need to hesitate about expressing their Tamil identity too.
“It is to draw attention to our people dying that we are here,” said one of the young protestors at Westminster. “Sri Lanka is killing Tamils. It is genocide.”
"Every single person here has relatives in Sri Lanka. They are killing them. We have a responsibility to save them and the British Government has a responsibility to save them," said Sivakumaravel.
“I’m protesting to get freedom and stop genocide of the Tamils in my homeland Tamil Eelam,” said Kavitha Sathiyamoorthy, who had been injured by the police and had her arm in a sling.
“I will stay here even if they were going to kill me … there’s so many of my brothers and sisters getting killed, there’s no harm in me losing my life for them,” she said.
The Tamil flag too is being flown with pride by the younger Tamils, who see it as part of their identity.
“Those flags are not just in support of the LTTE. To Tamils around the world they represent our suffering and our national struggle. We are not supporters of terrorists but we are treated like terrorists simply because we dare to say that there is genocide in our homeland or raise a flag in Parliament Square," said Mathavi Uthayanan, a 26-year-old medical student.
“Those are our flags. How would you feel if someone snatched the British flag off you?” asked Inthu Rubarajah, another young protestor in front of Westminster.
“They took our flags. That’s our flags. They wouldn’t like it if we done it to their flags,” said another young protestor.
However the actions of the police, and especially the force used against protestors, have raised questions among the younger Tamils about how Britain sees them.
“Personally I was physically man-handled, even though I was willing to get up,” said Rubarajah. “One male police officer flung me across the floor.”
“We were moving but they pushed us like animals,” she said. “They were herded us like animals when we were willing to move.”
“We had permission to stay where we were. We don’t understand why they charged at us,” said Siva, another young student at Westminster. “All of a sudden they charged at us, without no confirmation, no telling us anything.”
British-Tamils are also questioning the ‘Britishness’ of their identity.
“If you do not treat humans like humans, what’s the point of saying British?” Siva asked. “We were all university students at the front, girls, boys, kids.”
“I’ve never seen that side to police” Rubarajah said with tears in her voice. “[The actions of the police] are making us more angry. We are fighting for our human rights in Sri Lanka but we thought we had them here.”
“I’m a British citizen, I was born here. And yet we still get treated like animals,” said Sathiyamoorthy of her encounter with the British police.
“The mood of the crowd is angry. They don’t know who to trust,” said another, speaking after the police forcibly moved the protestors off the bridge. “We thought we could trust the British government.”