Seventeen days ago a British man began an indefinite hunger strike in Parliament Square. Tim Martin doesn’t want to die, yet there is a chance he may, not for his own selfish reasons, but to bring attention to the suffering of Tamil people in Sri Lanka.
“I am now on my thirteenth day of my hunger strike. I spent the first three days without food or water outside the American Embassy in London, but after the third day they asked me to leave, said Tim Martin , director of Act Now and a former aid worker in Sri Lanka. “The American Embassy didn’t want me to continue because they were worried we would have large Tamil protests.”
For two years, Martin lived and worked in the northern region of Sri Lanka, the area where the conflict has been taking place, and has seen the scale of the conflict firsthand.
Three days into the strike Mr Martin agreed to start drinking water when he received word that Foreign Secretary David Miliband had passed on Martin’s letter to President Obama. In the letter, Mr Martin asked for international monitors, free access to international media and international organisations, and emergency medical treatment for the Tamil people.
It is Mr Martin’s belief that President Obama could intervene in the crisis in Sri Lanka.
“I have no other alternative now but to keep the attention on Sri Lanka. When a war ends the media just shifts onto the next war and those that are still suffering will be forgotten,” said Mr Martin. “At the moment there are thousands of vulnerable people in the hands of an oppressive and singular government. They are being held in concentration camps not much different from Hitler’s concentration camps.”
Maria Gallastegui, who staged a hunger strike in February 2009 opposite the Houses of Parliament in London to protest against the situation in Gaza said: “Of course there are dangerous consequences, but Tim Martin is making the ultimate protest statement.”
“Tim just wants him to live up to his promise of global change, global peace. He wants President Obama to speak out on behalf of the Tamil people.”
Arjunan Ahilan, a Tamil protestor and university student in London, says Mr Martin’s actions are “very desperate, but necessary.” Having tried other means with no result, Mr Ahilan believes this may be the Tamils’ only hope for media attention and aid.
Whether Mr Martin’s actions will achieve his aim remains to be seen.
Sarah Green, spokeswoman for Amnesty International UK, said: “Amnesty International has no general view on the use of hunger-striking as a tactic because it is used widely and for many different objectives. The refusal to take food is not a human rights violation in itself, and nor is any government's refusal to concede to a hunger striker's demands necessarily a human rights violation either. As such Amnesty urges any hunger striker to take food, or any government to yield to
their demands.”
Tom Smith, chief executive of the British Society of Gastroenterology, provided the following information on starvation: To stay alive, you need 1,650 calories each day. Your body can store about 1,200 calories of carbohydrates-most in the liver. Just being alive, you burn through all your stored calories in less than one day. Once you burn through 70 to 94 percent of your body fat, and 20 percent of muscle, you die. For most people this takes around 61 days.
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