I was in Sri Lanka the day Tiger terrorists attacked The Central Bank in Colombo. My rushed visit was not a happy one for I lost a much loved sister to a sudden illness. I wish that I could erase that week from my mind for another reason. I heard the bomb that destroyed the Central Bank and Ceylinco House and witnessed the resultant agony of the innocent at the hands of Prabhakaran and his programmed killers. Brutality of the Tigers is so well known that the New York Times in May 1995 unequivocally stated that Prabhakaran "has shown a bloodthirstiness in dealing with opponents that has been compared with some of the cruelest figures in recent Asian history, including Pol Pot of Cambodia. "Terrorism by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is used with brutal impunity for a campaign of 'ethnic cleansing' in the North and the East, for intimidation and murder in the South. My former colleague at the Peradeniya University, Dr. Hasbullah, a Muslim activist has shown very clearly how every Muslim, whose ancestors have been living in the Northern district of Jaffna and Mannar had been terrorized by the Tigers into leaving their homes. Thousands of Muslims thus driven away are now languishing in refugee camps. In their relentless pursuit of having an 'ethnically cleansed' North and East, the Sinhala and Muslim border villages have been transformed into killing fields for the machete and ax brigades of the Tigers.
To the Tiger terrorist group of Sri Lanka every single Sri Lankan outside their group is their enemy or a convenient hostage to their cause. To the Tigers, it seems, killing a Sinhalese in particular, is to have one less enemy to cope with. The Central Bank bomb blast had no warning, hence it was a pre-meditated act to kill and maim. The resilience of all Sri Lankans, Sinhala, Tamil (40 percent of the community live among the Sinhalese in the South) Muslim, Burgher, is such we will build another Central Bank and a Ceylinco building, reenergize our financial institutions and secure our oil installations and our ports. But we cannot bring back the 18 of our sisters who while they were working in the library of the Central Bank were buried alive by the Tigers, bring back a mother to two little girls, herself a single parent who worked at the Air Lanka office. We cannot erase the human tragedy of more than hundred lives lost in one deadly blast. We cannot give back the sight to at least ninety people, some of them blind in both eyes.
Varuni Jayasekera was an employee of Air Lanka. Her office was just across the Central Bank building. Mother of two pre-teen girls whose father, Varuni's husband had died of an illness a few years earlier. Her killer, who carefully planned this pre-meditated murder, though very well known, will not be prosecuted any time soon. I shall call the next victim Mr. X, because he did not lose his life and being very strong minded would feel uncomfortable at receiving any personal sympathy we surely would feel. He, a top executive, working relentlessly to keep our leading financial institutions thriving was working at his computer when the bomb blast occurred. He had no time to protect his eyes. A deeply religious man, an avid reader with a brilliant mind, he has lost the sight of both eyes. Damage to both corneas has been so severe that no amount of surgery could repair them. Varuni Jayasekera and Mr. X did not ask for a separate state, did not vote for one, did not take up arms to kill the innocents of a fellow ethnic group. All they did want, in fact, as millions of others in Sri Lanka did was to ask for a peaceful resolution through a democratic process.
Terrorists, by definition do not like democracy. Indeed as the U.S. State Department Human Rights Report of 1995 has pointed out the LTTE does not tolerate freedom of expression, it tightly restricts the print and broadcast media in areas under its control and has often killed those who oppose it. Ambassador E. Gibson Lampher, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, in his submission on November 14, 1995 to the House Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific had made a few pointed observations on the current situation in Sri Lanka. Ambassador Lampher, while commending the Sri Lanka government for its efforts on maintaining human rights, pointed out that "[t]he LTTE controls territory in Northern and Eastern Sri Lanka through authoritarian rule, denying the people under its control of their civil liberties. The LTTE regularly carries out extrajudicial killings, including civilian massacres and assassinations, disappearances, arbitrary arrests, detention and torture."
While the bomb blast in the heart of Colombo last January demonstrated in no uncertain terms the reach of the arm of killers, we should never let it slip our minds that 'ethnic cleansing', has continued to be the basis of a machete and ax brigade of Tiger terrorists. We seem to associated the concept of ethnic cleansing with former Yugoslavia. Not so my friends, Tigers started that in Sri Lanka way before. The proposed Eelam territory cuts across the districts of Polonnaruwa, Anuradhapura in the North Western province, Batticaloa and Ampara in the Eastern province and Moneragala in the Uva province. The LTTE claims that these villages are a part of a separate 'Tamil homeland.' Professor Gerald Peiris of the Department of Geography, Peradeniya University has demonstrated that such a claim is indeed a false one. Using early population distribution records of Ceylon, Professor Peiris has shown that, although some of these villages have had new settlers from the South in new irrigated colonization schemes, they were either old Sinhala villages known as 'purana gamas' (ancient Sinhala villages), or areas left uninhabited, and certainly not the ancestral homeland of the Tamils. The Tamil homeland claim of the Eastern Province was at best limited to the coastal littoral of Batticaloa. Kingsley de Silva, Foundation Professor of Sri Lanka History of the University of Peradeniya has done a meticulous historical analysis of the Tamil homeland concept and proves the sheer untenability of a historical foundation for a Tamil homeland which encompasses the Eastern province.
Some of the villages that have come under ethnic cleansing terrorist attacks are Kebelithigollewa, Kalyanipura, Welioya, Bowatta, Panema, Parakramapura, Mangalagama and Kotiyagala. Almost 90 percent of huts in these villages are one room dwellings. The Tigers do not use guns but hack and chop the defenseless villages, men, women and children. In 1995, in October alone, the villages of Bowatta, Mangalagama, Parakramapura, Kotiyagala and Herathmillewa were attacked. 117 villagers were hacked to death. In point of fact the U.S. State Department Human Rights report notes that "in October 120 Sinhalese civilians were massacred by LTTE forces in an attempt to inflame communal violence. Many of the victims were hacked to death." Indeed in the border villagers it is pure and simple 'ethnic cleansing', to drive the non-Tamils from a Tiger version of Nazi 'Lebensraum'.
Killing of any innocent person, in any region in the country, whether Sinhala, Muslim or Tamil cannot be condoned. Now, let us ask the question whether innocent Tamils in the North are targeted the same way that Varuni was. The U.S. State Department Human Rights Report states that during recent army offensives, the government has taken measures to limit the number of civilian casualties. The report notes that "notices were dropped warning civilians to congregate in schools, churches and temples to minimize risks." The same report states that the LTTE used excessive force killing an indeterminate number of civilians. The brutal nature of the Tiger terrorist group is clearly revealed in the report which observes that, "[i]t was accused of using church and temple compounds (where civilians are instructed to congregate in the event of hostilities) as shield for the storage of munitions." We beg the question, are civilians caught in the cross fire or are they being deliberately used as a human shield by the Tigers? What is clear is that civilians in the North are certainly not targeted by the army for 'search, kill or maim' operations as the LTTE terrorist group does with the Sinhalese, Muslims and Tamils.
At the recently concluded World Cup cricket tournament, the Australian and the West Indian teams refused to play in Sri Lanka for fear of terrorism, or so they said. The Economist in its February 10, 1996 issue pointed out that "Even in cricket, to yield to terrorism is to feed it. "Terror tactics are designed to intimidate all of us with its single minded brutality accompanied by intolerance of diverse voices. We cannot yield to such terrorism. Varuni's death, and those of others who died in the Central Bank blast, the sorrow of their relatives, the terror that surely would be the final thoughts of the farming and fishing families in the East who did not have time to flee and hide, the suffering of the injured and the maimed are our sorrow and our burden as well. It then becomes our collective responsibility to think of ways and means to eradicate that terrorism that has brought into disrepute a noble animal, the Tiger.