The capital lay tense that night of July 24, gripped in suspense after receiving the news that 13 soldiers had been ambushed and killed by Tamil Tigers near Jaffna in the late hours of the previous night. An electrifying atmosphere hovered over Colombo as the funeral rites of those killed were conducted with military honours. [...]
While the country has been placed under lockdown, making newspaper distribution impossible, the Sunday Times team produced your favourite Sunday newspaper in digital format to bring you the latest news, feature stories and political commentaries. We are happy to announce that we are giving you free access to our digital paper. Click here to access the free epaper . If you like to be a subscriber to our regular epaper please click here .
The capital lay tense that night of July 24, gripped in suspense after receiving the news that 13 soldiers had been ambushed and killed by Tamil Tigers near Jaffna in the late hours of the previous night.
An electrifying atmosphere hovered over Colombo as the funeral rites of those killed were conducted with military honours. The two-minute silence observed by an emotionally charged nation to pay its last respects to the fallen would soon be broken when the hour of vengeance arrived the following day to shatter the island’s peace and leave the landscape sponged in blood for the next twenty-six years of its existence.
With the deadly attack, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had left its calling card on the mantlepiece of the Lankan President’s Office to announce its orgy of violence had just begun.
The Sinhala backlash that followed July twenty-third’s ambush went beyond the legitimate bounds of proportionate response when the largely Sinhala-dominated government stood rooted in inertia and turned a blind eye to a week-long riot of violence unleashed by organised Sinhala mobs against Tamil civilians in Colombo.
With the bloodletting allowed to wantonly flow by an apathetic government, Eelamist Tigers had gained the upper hand in the propaganda war that would soon ensue. Astutely, they remained in their secret northern lairs and let the brutal response speak for itself. It spoke volumes of Sinhala brutalism and made the grievous shock of July 23rd’s ambush pale into insignificance. The world remembered the horrors of Black July. Not the gory incident that had prompted it.
The western media were quick to embrace the Tigers as a band of freedom fighters, bent on emancipating their downtrodden brethren from the ferocity of Sinhala chauvinism, until later events proved otherwise. Stripped of their camouflage, they were soon exposed as being nothing more than an intransigent brigade of ruthless terrorists existing solely to wreak havoc in the name of establishing a separate state of Thamil Eelam on Sri Lankan soil.
THE LAST POST: Memorial in stone for the nation's Ranaviru
The 26-year sporadic bloodbath was about to commence. At stake was the unitary status of the island. The Tigers’ diabolic intent to dismember the country and claim one third of it to create a separate state for their brethren who were – and have been for generations – full-blown citizens of the country stood poised to break out into a full-scale war of terror and turn the island’s landscape into the killing fields of Asia.
While the world press strove to depict it as a civil war, the Lankan government held it purely as a war waged by a group of Tamil dissidents to win their demand for a separate state on sovereign Lankan soil through violence and intimidation. If that made them terrorists, so be it. Terrorism has been legally defined as ‘the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in pursuit of political aims.’
FLASHBACK TO JULY 1983: How the SUN and the DAVASA reported the news that changed the course of the nation’s history
It was the same definition applied by the British government to classify the Irish Republican Army as a terrorist organisation and its members as terrorists. But while Britain’s newspapers showed no reticence in condemning the IRA’s London bombings as vile terrorist acts, they described Tiger massacres as done by ‘Tamil rebels fighting for an independent state in Sri Lanka’. Apparently, to Fleet Street editors in the ’80s, what was sauce for the British goose wasn’t sauce for the Lankan gander.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam showed no qualms in resorting to the most violent means to realise their utopian dream of a separate state on Lanka’s sovereign soil. Driven by hysterical faith to see its physical manifestation on what they deemed to be their traditional homeland, they lost no time in earning their feared reputation as the most ruthless terrorist force the world had seen since perhaps Genghis Khan’s Mongolian Army walked upon the face of the earth.
They gained it by the atrocities done in the name of an elusive Eelam and flaunted the barbarism proudly on their breasts to drive fear into the hearts of their victims, even as they wore amulets of cyanide around their necks to make a cowardly exit from life if taken captive by the foe.
Take a look at the catalogue of horror that the Lankan people were forced to endure in fear for 26 years of their lives. See the terrifying parade of brutal killings, indiscriminate civilian bombings, grisly massacres of innocent villagers silently march on the gruesome catwalk of Tiger abominations.
The curtain opened on that wretched era of incessant Tiger outrages against the defenceless with a midnight attack on a Sinhala settlement located on the border of Mullaitivu and Vavuniya districts. Tiger squads massacred around 80 civilians, including women and children, living in the north’s Kent and Dollar Farms. It was the bell ringer to awaken the Lankan government to the fact that the Tigers would go to any lengths to realise their Eelam dream.
But the day the Tigers came of age and erected a new milestone to mark their villainy in no uncertain terms was on May 14, 1985. That day set them apart, apart from all other terrorist groups that view violence as a legitimate means to realise their objectives. Not even the elusive search for the Holy Grail of an Eelam could justify the random slaughter of innocent pilgrims who had converged on the sacred city of Anuradhapura to worship the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi that day in the Vesak month of May.
A Tiger hit squad had arrived at Anuradhapura that morn in a hijacked bus. They entered the city’s central bus stand and began firing at will at civilians who came across their line of fire. Leaving the scene of indiscriminate slaughter, the Tiger hit squad headed towards the sacred premises of the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi. Arriving at the revered site, they callously mowed down Buddhist monks, nuns, and a host of pilgrims engaged in worship and prayer with their automatic machine gunfire.
The toll of the Anuradhapura massacre by Tiger terrorists: 146 dead.
What purpose did the senseless slaughter serve? If the Tigers had expected the Sinhalese to retaliate by killing innocent Tamils in revenge, none came. But the desecration of this holiest of Buddhist sites in Lanka by the blood of the innocent would not be forgotten in a hurry. It stiffened Sinhala resolve. The Eelam malady must be seen through to the finish. Terrorism must be uprooted from the entire island mass.
In the ensuing years, Tiger massacres continued unabated. In 1986, the Mamaduwa bus bombing in Vavuniya claimed 130 innocent civilian lives. The year 1987 saw triple massacres take place. The Habarana bus attack left over 100 killed. A bomb blast in Pettah killed over a hundred people and injured more than a thousand. And in Aranthalawa, 33 Buddhist monks and 4 civilians were killed in cold blood.
The incident remains one of the most moving chapters in the annals of Tiger massacres. Young novice monks, led by the chief monk of the Mahavapi Maha Vihara in Ampara, were on a pilgrimage to the Kelaniya temple. The bus was stopped and boarded by Tiger cadres at a remote spot near the 21st milepost on the Ampara-Kandy Road. At gunpoint, the driver was forced to steer the bus off the road and take it into the isolated Aranthalawa jungle. It was here, off the beaten track, that the massacre began in earnest. The driver was shot. The chief monk was hacked to death. The novice monks were macheted. So were the four civilians.
It was yet another harrowing, blood-curdling trauma the Sinhalese had to face on an annual basis, a yearly ritualistic blood sacrifice made to propitiate the demi-god of Eelamist Tigers, Vellupillai Prabakaran, who, sole reigning from his underground bunker, held the tyranny of an unborn utopian Eelam.
As Tiger massacres continued year after year to become a morbid rite in the 1990s, they prompted the Sri Lankan Army to go on a rampage of their own. The army was also accused of committing atrocities against innocent Tamil civilians living in areas under army control in the north and east.
It only confirmed the truth of the maxim that terror begets terror.
With foreign powers exerting pressure for reasons of their own, successive Sri Lankan governments were compelled to push the goal posts further back each time the military neared to score a winning goal.
But Al-Qaeda’s attack on New York’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, dramatically turned the tide against the LTTE’s fortunes. With a global ‘War on Terror’ declared, international pressure against the LTTE increased sharply, and a welcome lull fell on their terrorist activities from 2001 to 2006.
After the lull, a storm of LTTE violence followed. The massacres began. But the deluge was to hasten the Tigers’ end. Though they could not see it, it was writ on the cards.
The LTTE had gone through the whole gamut of killings, massacres, suicide bombings, and genocidal attacks on some Sinhala border villages. Now their dreaded reign of terror stood poised to come to a climactic end.
The Kebithigollewa massacre, which occurred when two Claymore directional mines hit a bus carrying civilian passengers on June 15, 2006, shocked the nation no end. The tragic incident claimed the lives of 67 civilians. Pregnant mothers and 15 children, some of them still in their infancy, were among the dead. A further 64 were wounded in the Claymore mine attack.
On receiving the ghastly news, President Mahinda Rajapaksa, together with his brother Gotabaya, the country’s Secretary of Defence, immediately flew to the site of carnage. They visited the Anuradhapura hospital and its mortuary to console the grieving families of the dead.
But even before the President could express a word of sympathy, intense anger intruded to prevent him from going through the motions when a distraught Sinhala villager named D. K. Dasanayake held up the blood-soaked body of his small son and asked President Mahinda Rajapaksa: ‘Mekada Mahinda Chinthanaya kiyanney?’
If doubts had existed in the president’s mind, what course he should follow regarding the terrorist war, this was the moment that dispelled all doubts. Hearing the words directed against him, Mahinda Rajapaksa realised the truth contained in them. If he had soft-pedalled on the Eelam issue, in deference to foreign powers, this was the moment that stiffened his resolve to see the fight to the finish.
It was to bring the war to a speedy end that he had been elected as president. It was to end 26 years of misery and tears, to stop the terror that stalked the land and rid the tension that walked with it, to lift the suspense and ease the stress that the people had voted him as president. He would do their bidding, even if it meant he would lose his throne for an electric chair.
With his mind irrevocably made up, President Mahinda Rajapaksa returned to his office in Colombo. From here, a series of events would be set in motion. The trail would finally end on the banks of the Nandikadal lagoon, where the demi-god of the Eelamist Tigers lay dead.
But even though the terrorist war for Eelam ended on the banks of a Mullaitivu lagoon, the utopian dream did not die.
That’s the reason why this nation must dedicate itself to be vigilant and ensure the spectre of terror lies still, with a stake driven through its heart.
As the nation commemorated ‘War Heroes Day’ on May 19 this year to mark the day – May 18 – the 26-year war ended, the Sunday Punch pays respects and salutes the fallen brave, who fought and fell for the motherland’s sake, and quotes a verse from Laurance Binyon’s famous poem ‘For the Fallen’ written to honour World War I war veterans.
‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
Buying or selling electronics has never been easier with the help of Hitad.lk! We, at Hitad.lk, hear your needs and endeavour to provide you with the perfect listings of electronics; because we have listings for nearly anything! Search for your favourite electronic items for sale on Hitad.lk today!
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked. Comments should be within 80 words. *
Post Comment Other Columns Tribunal orders Shani’s promotion as DIG, backdated to August 2020 Economic woes stemming from rupee slide stir spectre of 2022 crisis A fall from grace What can we learn from Viet Nam’s experience? A judicial reminder to the NPP government of the ‘dignity of public office’ As rupee falls, opposition MPs rise to warn of crisis, but Govt. stays confident Hope for Sri Lanka Cricket as Eran committee gets down to work Search The Sunday Times Home Archive Feeds Contact Us RSS ↑ Print Edition – The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka Print Edition – The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka
Loading comments…