Cold Blooded Murder in Maximum Security Jails - 1

(MELBOURNE) - You may have thought that Mullivaaikkal of May 2009 was the only massacre the Sinhalese inflicted on the Tamils. They had several anti-Tamil riots to their credit, the worst of which was in July 23 and 24 1983 and two massacres in Welikade Maximum Security Prison. As a result these riots and massacres are referred to as Black July. The following is an account of the two massacres.

First Massacre on 25 July 1983

In retaliation for the atrocities committed by Sri Lankan soldiers in Jaffna, LTTE ambushed a Sinhalese military convey on 23 July 1983 near Thinevely, Jaffna, in which 13 soldiers were killed. This would have gone off as one of the many instances of violence in the country had not President Jayawardene decided to teach the Tamils a lesson for their audacity.

Between July 23 and 29, Tamils were systematically targeted with violence in Colombo and many other parts of Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan Governments officials categorized the violence as uncontrollable race riots instigated by the killing of 13 Sinhala soldiers on the night of July 23. However, the course of events during Black July illustrated the Sri Lankan Government’s undeniable involvement in the genocidal acts against Tamils.

The army rounded up hundreds of Indian Tamils, who had earlier fled the anti-Tamil riots of 1977 and 1981, and they were settled in farms created by the Tamil Gandhian leader, Dr.Rajasunderam, in Trincomalee, Mannar, and Vavuniya. Once Dr.Rajasdundram was arrested, they were forcibly taken and left without possessions in their former homeland in the central hills. Dr.Rajasunderam, became one of the casualties in the Welikade massacre.

Before the riots broke out in Colombo, the army in Jaffna went on rampage killing 51 innocent Tamil civilians. In Trincomalee, similar violence broke out as members of the Navy randomly shot at civilians and burnt down Tamil properties. Even a Tamil child was thrown into the burning fire.

In the evening in Colombo, the state funeral was being organized for the dead soldiers. Thousands of people arrived at the cemetery but the bodies failed to appear. After waiting several hours, much of the crowd objecting the burial in Kanatte, and demanded the bodies to be returned to the next of kin. As the large crowd began to leave the grave, a new group of people (identified as government gangs) entered the Borella junction and raised anti–Tamil cries. As the anti-government cries subsided, anti-Tamil cries became dominant and arson and murdering of Tamils broke out all over the country. As an extension of these riots, the Wellikade Prison massacre of 53 prisoners took place.

Nadarajah Thangathurai and Selvarajah Yogachandran @ Kuttimuni were members of Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO) and were charged with four others for an ambush of state owned Bank’s jeep at Neervely on 25 March 1981 and the robbery of Rs.8 million. On 5 April 1981 Kuttimani, Thangathurai and Jegan were arrested near Manalkaadu, while trying to escape to Tamil Nadu.

The trial started on 2 November 1982 and all the accused refused to plead guilty on the ground that they were citizens of Tamil Eezham, that they were engaged in a lawful resistance movement against alien Sinhala rule and that the Sri Lanka Court had no jurisdiction to try them for incidents which, in any event, were alleged to have taken place within Tamil Eelam.

The trial lasted 3 months. During their incarceration they complained of severely torture under PTA. The International Commission of Jurists reported: "From informal records held in Jaffna, the author has discovered that at least 23 members of the Tamil community have died in, or as a result of being in army or police custody since July 1979....Several instances were reported to the author of persons being hung upside down with a bag covering their head into which was introduced fine ground dried chilli powder. Evidence of the effect of this on the metabolism of the lungs was read by the author in the inquest depositions.

From discussions with detainees and families of detainees, the author accepts that it is the almost universal practice of the military authorities to physically assault and mistreat these persons who have been in their custody, with the principal locations for that assault being the Elephant Pass army camp and the Panagoda army camp in Colombo "

At the conclusion of the trial when the judge asked the accused whether they had anything to say. Each of them made statements from the dock. Nadarajah Thangathurai's statement remains a moving political testament of the movement that he had led. With simplicity, dignity and clarity he declared:

"We are not lovers of violence, nor victims of mental disorders. We are honest fighters belonging to an organization that is struggling to liberate a people. To those noble souls who keep on prating ‘terrorism, terrorism’ we have something to say.

Did you not get frightened of terrorism when hundreds of Tamils were massacred in cold blood, when racist hate spread like fire in this country of yours? Did terrorism mean nothing to you when Tamil women were raped? When cultural treasures were set on fire? When hundreds and hundreds of Tamil homes were looted?

Why in 1977 alone 400 Tamils lost their lives reddening the sky above with their splattered blood - did you not see any terrorism then? Did your thoughts and feelings become deadened when it concerned Tamil lives and Tamil property or are your minds unable to conceive the very idea of Tamil suffering?.." and concluded:

"The consequences of the verdict of this Court will not touch us, content as we are that we have done our duty. We will not flinch from embracing death or spending the rest of our lives in jail... All these are merely commonplace incidents in the history of a nation's struggle for freedom. We were fully conscious of what we were doing. Hence there is no question of disappointment... The seeds we sowed were not seeds of poison, our arrow heads were not dipped in venom.. These tribulations are a boon bestowed by God to purify us. The final victory is ours. Long Live Tamil Eelam!''...

Subsequently on, 24 February 1983, Kuttimani, Thangathurai, Jegan and another 3 were sentenced to death in the Neervely Bank robbery case. After being sentenced by the courts, Kuttimani in his statement said, “Kuttimani will be sentenced to death today, but tomorrow there will appear thousands of Kuttimanis. They will not be innocent like me, but more vigorous...” He made one request to the court. He expressed his desire to donate his eyes to Tamils, so that they may see the birth of Eelam through his eyes. Jagan also made a similar request.

Around May 1983, the government moved many political prisoners held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, including Nadarajah Thangathurai and Selvarajah Yogachandran, from the army camp at Panagoda to the jail at Welikade. Panagoda was a special prison, in an army camp in an outlying suburb of Colombo and conveniently set up for torture and 'investigative interrogation'.

But if the prisoners were killed whilst at Panagoda, the government of Sri Lanka may have been directly implicated for the act of the army. Sections of the maximum security Welikade jail, however, housed a large number of Sinhala prisoners as well. The move from Panagoda to Welikade assisted the plan to murder the Tamil militants in custody, at an appropriate time and explain away the murder as a "prison riot".

Whilst their appeal to the Supreme Court was pending those involved in the case - Nadarajah Thangathurai, Selvarajah Yogachandran, Devan, Sivapatham, and Nadesudasan were murdered in a high security prison in Welikade .

The violence broke out on July 25, 1983 at the Welikade “high security” prison, four miles north of Colombo.It was premeditated government organised murder. Angry Sinhalese inmates wielding spikes, clubs and iron rods broke into the ward housing Tamil prisoners including convicted separatist guerrillas. It is suspected that prison guards may have provided the Sinhalese inmates with tools to break in to the Tamil ward. The prison officers who were all Sinhalese later explained that the keys to the cells had been stolen from them. However, certain Tamil prisoners, who survived, said that the prison officers had let the keys fall into the hands of the Sinhalese prisoners while other Tamil prisoners reported that the cell doors had been deliberately left unlocked. Amnesty International later noted that prison authorities had assisted the rioters at the Welikade prison (Amnesty International 1984:301). Thirty-five Tamil prisoners were massacred as a result of the prison ‘riots’ on July 25. A curfew was finally imposed at the end of the day when the job was completed.

"Selvarajah Yogachandran, popularly known as Kuttimani, a nominated member of the Sri Lankan Parliament...,one of the 53 prisoners killed in the maximum security Welikade prison in Colombo was forced to kneel down in his cell, where he was under solitary confinement, by his assailants and ordered to pray to them. When he refused, he was taunted by his tormentors about his last wish, when he was sentenced to death. He had willed that his eyes be donated to someone so that at least that person would see an independent Tamil Eelam through his eyes.. The assailants then gouged his eyes...He was then stabbed to death and his testicles were wrenched from his body. This was confirmed by one of the doctors who had conducted the post-mortem of the first group of 35 prisoners." (Madras Hindu, 10 August 1983)

One version has it that Kutimani's tongue was cut out by an attacker who drank the blood and cried: "I have drunk the blood of a Tiger." The other prisoner whose eyes was gourged out was Ganeshanathan Jeganathan. He too had expressed a desire from the dock that his eyes be donated to Tamils.

Christopher Theodore Jansz was the Acting Prison Commissioner as Prisons Commissioner J. P. Delgoda was out of the country. He sensed that a second Welikada Prison riots was about to take place at around 2.45 p.m. He contacted the police and informed that there was a serious situation in the prisons. The Tamil prisoners are being killed. He was unable to get there as the army was in control. He was told, “If the army is in control, we had better keep off. We can’t afford to have a rub with the army.”

When Jansz returned to Welikada Prison, he discovered that a second massacre had occurred at around 4p.m. on 27 July 1983. When curfew was imposed 18 of the 28 suspects formerly housed in C3 had died, including one professional, Rajasunderam. In the two massacres 53 of the 72 inmates died that is 74 per cent, of the PTA detainees were murdered. The SP, his two ASPs and two jailers were reportedly absent that day. Commissioner J. P. Delgoda returned to the country that night after attending an overseas conference.

The Guardian had obtained a first-hand account of part of the fighting in this incident, including the circumstances in which Sri Lanka's Gandhian leader, Dr. Rajasunderam, died. Dr. Rajasunderam was one of nine men, including two Catholic priests and a Methodist minister, who were moved out of their cells immediately after the July 25 killings to make way for the survivors of the first massacre. They were moved into their cells on security grounds -- into a padlocked hall, upstairs in the same block. The nine, convinced that further attacks were coming, made repeated representations to the prison authorities on July 26 for better security measures. Assurances were given that they would be protected, but nothing was done.

At 2:30 pm in July 27, hearing screaming and whistling outside, one of the priests looked out of a high window and saw prisoners breaking in from a neighboring compound, wielding axes, iron bars, pieces of firewood, and sticks. There was no sign of the prison guards. The mob, which was later found to have killed 16 prisoners in the downstairs cells, ran up to the hall and began breaking the padlock. Dr. Rajasunderam then went to the door and cried out: "Why are you trying to kill us? What have we done to you?" At that moment, the door burst open and Dr. Rajasunderam was hit on the side of the neck with an iron rod. Blood was seen to spurt several feet. "At that juncture, we thought we should defend ourselves," one of the prisoners related. "We broke the two tables in the hall and took the legs to defend ourselves." "We kept them at bay. They threw bricks at us. We threw them back. Pieces of firewood and an iron bar were thrown at us. We used them to defend ourselves. It went on for about half an hour.

They shouted: 'You are the priests, we must kill you.'" The killing was eventually ended by the army, who moved in with tear gas. An inquest has been opened into the Welikada massacres, but the above details did not emerge. Prison warders claim that keys to the cells were stolen from them. Lawyers for the prisoners, who have accused the warders of having participated, claim that they were not given the opportunity to bring evidence despite representation to the Government. "

In the Jaffna prison, three Tamil prisoners were killed by prison officials when they attempted to attack Sinhalese prisoners in retaliation to the Welikade killings. That brought the death toll to 56.

Of the 35 killed in the Welikada jail on July 25 the loss of Thangathurai and Kuttimani was a great blow to the liberation movement in Eelam. Both of them had very good relationship with Prabhakaran. Thangathurai was a well-educated ideologist, and he would have created unity among all the liberation movements. The death of these two brought in Sri Sabaratnam as the leader of TELO. He did not have the vission or charisma of all the above three leaders and as a result he relied heavily on India and by extension the Indian Intelligence wing, RAW.

TELO and LTTE policies drifted apart with TELO wanted to toe the Indian line and Prabhakaran felt that Indian views will not meet Tamil aspirations. Soon these differences led to internecine war, in which TELO was decimated. If Thangathurai was alive this tragedy as well as the loss of hundreds of valuable lives could have been avoided and the history of the liberation movement would have been different.

Another unfortunate loss in the carnage was Dr. Rajasunderam, who led a Gandhian movement. He set up settlements for the Indian Tamils, who were displaced from the Hill Country. He was arrested on suspicion of helping the ‘terrorists’. He was killed during the second riot on 27 July 1983.

"It is not clear how it was possible for the killings to take place without the connivance of prison officials, and how the assassinations could have been repeated after an interval of two days, since Welikade prison is a high security prison and the Tamil prisoners were kept in separate cells..." (Ethnic Violence in Sri Lanka, 1981-83: Staff Report of the International Commission of Jurists, ICJ Review)

"... it is relevant to mention the gruesome massacre of 53 Tamil prisoners in the Welikade jail in Colombo on July 25 and 27 last year. Many of them were only detainees on suspicion and not convicted prisoners. After they were brutally murdered, their wives, sisters, children and parents came to know about their death only through the radio. Much more terrible was the fact that the bodies of these detainees were buried or cremated without any member of the families knowing or being present. They were not even given the chance of having a last look at the body.

No amount of sanctimonious expressions of sorrow or statements made before the Commission that the Sri Lankan Government was not proud of what happened at the Colombo jail would be acceptable to the civilised world, when up to date, the government has failed or neglected or refused to order an independent judicial inquiry into this unprecedented slaughter of those who were in the custody of the Government. (Statement by All India Womens Conference at UN Sub Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, 24 August 1984)

"The most brutal and obviously well organised massacres took place within the confines of a prison located in the capital city. A prison is by definition a high security establishment, this is particularly so of the Welikade Prison which even by official terminology of the Sri Lankan government, is a 'maximum security' establishment. Yet not one but two gruesome massacres occur within its walls in the space of a week!..'' (R.K. Karanjia in The Blitz, 6 August 1983

The trials of Tamil militants under the Prevention of Terrorism Act had become an embarrassment to the government. Allegations of torture had attracted observers from the International Commission of Jurists and from Amnesty International. The Court itself had become a forum for agitation in support of the claim of the Tamil people that they constituted a nation.

''Very few believed the story that these killings were the result of a prison riot. How did the other prisoners get out of their cells? Where did they get their weapons? And, most important who put these Island Re-convicted Criminals next to the detenues and in the same building? And when? And even if one overlooked the first killings, how to explain the killing of a further seventeen Tamil detenues the following day? What were the prison authorities doing....? Why did'nt they send the Tamil detenues to a safer place?... This coldly calculated murder of Tamil prisoners will be an eternal blot on the Sri Lankan government that nothing can wipe it out. An army officer who had visited the prison morgue told me that the détentes must have been attacked with clubs and knives. Kuttimuni had been badly slashed...'' (Eye witness account, Sri Lanka: Racism and the Authoritarian State - Race and Class, Volume XXVI, A.Sivanandan and Hazel Waters, Institute of Race Relations)

The post mortem inquiry into the death of the Tamil prisoners at Welikade, returned a verdict of homicide. Amnesty International reported in June 1984:

"Amnesty International has itself interviewed one Tamil detainee who survived the killing and has received a sworn statement from another survivor, both of whom state that some prisoners who had come to attack them later told the surviving detainees that they had been asked to kill Tamil prisoners. According to the sworn statement: 'We asked these people as to why they came to kill us. To this they replied that they were given arrack by the prison authorities and they were asked to kill all those at the youth offenders ward (where the Tamil prisoners were kept)'.

Mr. Jansz shared his fears with the secretary, Ministry of Justice, that morning that a second attack was imminent. Mr. Jansz, was present at the Security Council meeting in the afternoon, where President J. R. Jayewardene had advised him to liaise with Brigadier Mano Madawela to transfer the remaining prisoners to the Batticaloa prison. According to Sinha Ratnatunga (page 30), “… President Jayewardene wanted the rest of the prisoners sent immediately to the Jaffna prisons, but Ministers Lalith Athulathmudali and Ranil Wickremesinghe (the present UNP leader on whom Tamils have faith in) opposed it, saying that the Sinhalese would become further infuriated over such a decision. When a compromise was suggested, Negombo, close to the International Airport, the President opposed it, saying there would be a repeat performance there.”

Kuttimany Yogarajah, 2. N.Thangathurai, 3. Nadesathasan, 4. Jegan 5. Sivarasa, 6. Sivan Anpalagan 7. Balasubramaniam 8. Suresh Kumar, 9. Arunthavarajah, 10. Thanabalasingham,11.Arafat 12. P.Mahendran 13. K.Thillainathan 14. S.Kularajesekaran 15. Uthaya Kumar 16. S.Sivakumar 17. A.Rajan 18. S.Balachandran 19. Yogachandran Kili, 20. S. Subramaniam; 21. Mylvaganam Sinniah 22. G.Mylvaganam; 23. C.Sivanantharajah;24. T.Kandiah, 25. S.Sathiyaseelan; 26.Kathiravetpillai; 27. Easvaranathan 28. K.Nagarajah; 29. Gunapalan Ganeshalingham; 30 Anbalagan Sundaram; 31 Ramalingham Balachandran; 32. K.Thavarajasingham; 33. K.Krishnakumar; 34.R.Yoganathan; and 35. A.Uthayakumar.

1.Muthukumar Sri Kumar; 2. Amirthanayagam Philip; 3. Kulasingham Kumar; 4. Selachami Kumar; 5. Kandasamy Sarwesvaran; 6. A. Mariampillai; 7. Sivapatham Neethirajah; 8. Devanayagam Paskaran; 9. Ponniah Thurairajah alias Thangathurai; 10. Gnanamuthu Navaretnasingham; 11. Kandiah Rajendran alias Robert; 12. Dr. Somasundaram Rajasundaram; 13. Somasundaram Manoranjan, 14. Arumugam Seyan alias Appu;15. Thamotherampillai Jegamohanandan; 16. Sinnathamby Sivasubramaniam; 17. Selliah Rajaratnam and 18. Kumarasamy Ganeshalingham