Two Tamil activists who had vowed to starve themselves to death outside parliament unless Britain intervened politically in the Sri Lankan conflict were on the verge of ending their hunger strike last night as part of a deal brokered with MPs.
The students, from Mitcham in south London, have been on hunger strike since Monday in Parliament Square which has been illegally occupied all week by around 500 Tamil supporters in the largest protests since demonstrations there were banned in 2005.
Simon Hughes, a Liberal Democrat MP who has been involved in negotiations between the Tamils and police, said last night that one of the men had agreed to suspend his hunger strike in order to travel to the UN in New York with Labour MP Des Browne, the government's special envoy for Sri Lanka.
Supporters feared that the pair, who only began sipping liquids again late on Thursday night, were close to renal failure. Prarameswaran Subramaniam, 28, was said last night to have agreed to begin taking liquids regularly while Sivatharsan Sivakumaraval, 21, had agreed to suspend his hunger strike to travel to New York.
Other protesters, who are mainly Tamil students and young people, are to travel to meet political representatives in Washington DC, to Brussels to meet representatives of the EU's presidency and to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.
Hughes said separate negotiations with police would pave the way for the protests to move to a legal, semi-permanent footing. "The police were very keen that this became legitimate," said the MP who added that the protest will essentially move from the grass area on the square on to the pavement.
"It's about getting into a situation where there are then regular requests for a protest which the police can then back, a bit like the old protests outside the South African embassy. People here want urgent political action but they realise that cannot happen if political leaders around the world cannot be mobilised."
Talks have also been taking place with a view to forming an interfaith group of representatives from the Hindu, Christian and Buddhist communities who might then start talks with the Sri Lankan government.
The protesters have been calling on the British government to take action to help protect Tamils in their homeland, where the Sri Lankan government has rejected calls for a ceasefire. Up to 150,000 people are trapped in the war zone in the north of the country, according to the UN. The demands of the two hunger strikers included a ceasefire and that food and medical aid be allowed to reach civilians.
Dr Jayendran Namasivayam, a radiologist at Whipps Cross Hospital in Leytonstone who has been helping to look after the two, said: "What they say is that our people are dying every second and every minute of every day and that our point has to be made to Gordon Brown."
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