The Tale Of Two Women
By V. Kanthaiya -November 11, 2014
Sri Lanka is rich in culture. We have a history over 5000 years. Majority of the people in the country practice the teachings of Buddha which itself is rich moral principles.
Fine! This is the typical introduction a “true” Sri Lankan would give about his/her country. Interesting irony is that We Sri Lankans talk quite a lot about our 5000 years long history and the heritage, but hardly discuss about the past fifty year history of the country. Perhaps there is nothing to be proud about the period.
It is said Sri Lanka gained sovereignty from the British without shedding a single drop of blood. But an objective version would be that British didn’t need any drop of Blood to give the sovereignty back to the Sri Lankans. But later, the same so called sovereignty needed a gruesome bloodbath of Sri Lankans.
This column is not about the Sri Lankan history. This is about two women whom the Sri Lankan state has barbarically massacred in the name of protecting its sovereignty. The women share more similarities than their differences, yet the present Sri Lankan society conceive the fate of these women in two completely different perspectives.
First one is Premawathi Manamperi, from the southern tip of the island. In 1971, she was arrested by the Sri Lanka armed forces for her alleged participation in the JVP insurgency (not terrorism??). Her torturers stripped her naked and paraded her along the streets of Kataragama. She was shot and buried alive that night. Later her tormentors returned to finish off their “duty” with a bullet through the skull. Mannamperi was just 22 years old when she met her gruesome death.
38 years later, another woman met the same gruesome death at the hands of the Sri Lanka armed forces. Her name was Shoba a.k.a Isaipriya. She was born in 1982 and attended Manippai Green Memorial School till her fifth grade and later attended Veampadi Girls High School. She joined “Nitharsanam”, the media division of LTTE in 1996 where she mainly worked as a news reader and took part in the movement’s propaganda activities.
