I spent a couple of hours on Cornhill Street after that. It is one of the main streets leading to the Bank of England, and had a lot going on. After an hour or so of rubbernecking to see the protesters on the other side of the police lines, the crowd on the outer side of the police line got bolshier and more aggressive, as did the police. Both seemed to be egging each other on a bit. Channel 4 and the BBC were both there at the time, so the troublemakers in the crowd (both protesters and police) may have been playing to the cameras.

Anyway, for whatever reason, a couple of police thought it would be a wonderful idea to arrest someone and drag him through the crowd. This happened around 7:15pm and was not a very bright thing to do.

In response to this, three dozen or so people chased the police with the protester up the street. Debris was thrown at the cops, various names and epithets were uttered, and the police had to get their backs to the wall and wait for some of their colleagues to rush up with their batons a-batting people left, right and centre in order to clear a bit of space and leave.

Shortly after that, just off a side road from Cornhill Street, came the police with their German Shepherd dogs without muzzles. I went to check on this because I thought I saw someone get chomped by one of the dogs. Getting closer didn’t make for much fun, however, because things were in full psycho mode by that time. The police were moving fast and got either side of me, and when I moved after a cop told me to move, another one was behind me, baton at the ready and German Shepherd barely under control on his leash. Since I had just seen a cop let his dog loose by accident, and only just get the dog under control before it was too late, I was not a happy camper.

I said, ‘Which way should I go? Your buddy just told me to go this way?’ He yelled at me to move, two or three times, and threatened me with his baton and his dog and said he would ‘take me in’. Since we hadn’t even been introduced, and I didn’t fancy a nip of that sort, I left his, ahem, embrace and buggered off 30 yards or so.

A few minutes later, one of the protesters, a man in his 20s or 30s, collapsed on the pavement. The guy was totally out of it when I went to take a look at him. Protesters informed the police, and then allowed the police to carry the man back to their lines using what looked like a tarpaulin to carry him away. Twenty minutes or so later, after the police had used their dogs and more riot cops to clear Cornhill Street back up to Bishopsgate, two ambulances came up Grace Church Street and were let down Cornhill by the protesters and police to attend to the injured. I have since been able to confirm that the person who died was the one I saw.

Ten minutes or so after that, three police vans came up Grace Church Street, which runs directly into Bishopsgate. Various protesters/rioters threw bottles and debris at them. A very solid hit on the side window of one of the vans by some masonry led to the police hightailing it back the other way.

After a bit of time in that area, I noticed that some city workers who had gotten well pissed, and were looking for a fight, were all holding empty beer bottles behind them so that people could not see them. After seeing these guys trying to pick fights with some of the protesters, I did my civic duty and told a police officer about them. It seemed like the right thing to do since they (the police) were wasting their time trying to protect a store that no-one was bothering. Said city boys, all suited and booted and looking as if they were rugby players, were made to drop their bottles and escorted out of the area.

Following a notice about the Climate Camp being charged by the police, I headed back to where I had started. Over the next couple of hours I witnessed a generally well behaved crowd on either side of the now rock-solid police lines. The odd yahoo on my side of the barrier, sure, plenty of alcohol was openly being consumed, but there was no reason why the police had to be so heavy handed with the Climate Camp. The camp was full of fluffies, not so-called Anarchists.

For my swan song of the night, I had my ‘friends’ the police dogs back in the frame. I stayed well clear of the buggers this time. Once they were out of their pens in the back of the police vans they had been brought in, it took the police about 45 minutes to push the crowd on the outer side of the penned-in Climate Camp back up Bishopsgate towards and then past Liverpool Street station. From what I was told, the Climate Camp people were slowly being let out around the same time, allegedly being ID’d under the terrorism laws. I can’t confirm that yet, but the police have misused the terrorism laws in the UK on dozens of occasions, and have been reprimanded by judges for doing that, so what’s one more time, eh?

According to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Karuna has longstanding involvement in torture, extrajudicial killings, attacks against Tamil-speaking Muslims, and the recruitment of child soldiers in Sri Lanka, all of which are crimes under international law.

Before he split with his eastern followers from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in early March 2004, Karuna was one of the most senior members of that separatist organisation. While the Tamil Tigers have always been able to use the long-standing wellspring of antigovernment resentment amongst Tamils to recruit fighters, LTTE leaders have never had any qualms about using force to compel recruits. Karuna was no different in this regard. One of his responsibilities was to maintain the recruitment of cadres for the LTTE from the eastern Batticaloa region, since recruits from his part of the country had a reputation as some of the most reliable and battle ready cadres the LTTE had.

While he was not initially successful following the split with the LTTE, having been routed in a military campaign by the LTTE against him over the Easter weekend of 2004, by late 2005, Karuna convinced the Sri Lankan government to fully back him and his band of Tamil cadres as part of its counterinsurgency strategy against the Tigers.

Child soldier recruitment

Then, in November 2005, following the election of current President Mahinda Rajapakse, the Sri Lankan army and the Karuna faction went on a war footing following a series of provocations by the LTTE. As a result, by mid-2006 Karuna was back in the game of child soldier recruitment with a vengeance. The difference this time, his Tamil-based group were aided and abetted by the Sri Lankan government, as I saw for myself during a research mission with Human Rights Watch in Eastern Sri Lanka in October 2006. (See ‘Complicit in Crime: State Collusion in Abductions and Child Recruitment by the Karuna Group’ http://hrw.org/reports/2007/srilanka0107/ )

While traveling through the East that month, my colleagues and I spoke to dozens of local Tamil and Muslim civilians caught in the fighting between the LTTE and the government forces and its paramilitary ally, the Karuna faction. Karuna and his people came up in almost every interview that we conducted. The scale of his operations had gone viral since I had last been in Sri Lanka the previous November. According to what we were told and verified, it included extortion, kidnapping, assassinations and other forms of extra-judicial killings, illegal detention, and child soldier recruitment.

The complicity between Karuna and the Sri Lankan armed forces was so blatant that when we asked a woman near Batticaloa town how her 14 year old son and his friends could have been taken through all the checkpoints to the Karuna faction office in Batticaloa without being questioned by the security forces, she looked at us as if we were stupid and said rhetorically, ‘They [the security forces and Karuna's people] are all working together, no?’

A fair trial?

The UK government is now in a quandary about what to do with him. While there has been much fine talk about the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the emerging universality of international law, the rhetoric often doesn’t meet up with reality because the international infrastructure and legal norms are still very much a work in progress. The UK’s adherence to the existing international human rights conventions, while better than many countries, needs to improve dramatically in cases like Karuna.

Many perpetrators from the world’s war zones are inevitably going to show up from time to time in London. The UK government needs to be fully on board with the conventions against the recruitment of child soldiers, torture and the jurisdiction of the ICC, to name just a few. It’s simply not acceptable to just be a signatory to such documents. The government also needs to make all such conventions and international courts applicable to UK law both on paper and in practice.

Instead of suggesting, as it did to the BBC a few days ago, that Karuna could possibly be sent back to Sri Lanka because he apparently came here illegally. The government and the judicial system in this country should take a more nuanced and humane stance to the situation that they find themselves.

When the BBC uncovered the fact that Faryadi Zardad, an Afghan warlord, was living in the UK in March 2001, the case was examined by Scotland Yard’s antiterrorism branch. Charges were laid and Zardad was found guilty in a UK court of a campaign of hostage-taking and kidnapping in Afghanistan in July 2005.

Karuna has a long-list of offences that he could potentially be charged with and held accountable for in a UK court. Anyone who tells you that he would receive a fair trial in Sri Lanka, now that he is no longer useful for the government there, is simply not believable.

Andrew Kendle has been a consultant on Sri Lankan issues for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. He worked for Peace Brigades International in Sri Lanka in 1994-1996