By
Colombo Telegraph -June 25, 2012
Below
we produce Tim Kings report based on Colombo Telegraph
revelation.
I’ve
written about Issapria before… she was a young reporter from Sri Lanka whose
life and dignity were stripped away by government forces as they carried out a
series of war crimes on the minority Tamil population.
Issapria's body is lying in the foreground on the
left.
The
acts manifested particularly savagely in the Vanni during the bloody month of
May 2009.
The
Tamil minority of Sri Lanka waged a decades-long war for independence. This
unfortunate young woman was born into her existence, she didn’t choose it. Her
whole life was in front of her, when she was viciously sexually attacked and
murdered. This is the only woman I ever came to know after she was already
dead.
To
this day, in spite of mounting evidence, the government of Sri Lanka denies that
it conducted illegal war crimes against both resistance fighters and civilians
in the north during the conclusion of the three-decade long civil war.
The
administration of President Majinda Rajapakse refuses to acknowledge that its
goal was to humiliate and eradicate these Hindu and Christian victims.
But
Issapria, even in her death, is here to tell us a story that
allows everyone to conclusively agree that allegations of sex abuse,
murder and mass deception are part of this war and thus, a direct attribute of
the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) and the Rajapakse government. Allowing Sri Lanka’s
crimes against its own citizens to remain unpunished, is like issuing a license
for mass murder.
It
rubs salt in the wounds of all war crime victim families, and makes
international law, frankly, into little more than a joke. Sri Lanka’s excuse for
ethnic cleansing is that the fought terrorists, but it employed terrorism a
thousand times more potent.
There
are too many excuses. These are what this government offers when it is not
directly accusing its critics of being blatant liars with personal
agendas.
Excuses,
reasons, explanations…
Also
known as ‘Shoba’, Issapria was many things. She was a mother, a dancer, an actor
and journalist with TamilNet, a media group we often carry. Issapria was a
member of the armed resistance group LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) but
she had health issues and she didn’t carry a rifle, she carried a
microphone.
But
even if she had been a full bore LTTE fighter, there are international laws that
protect combatants after they are prisoners of war.
Sri
Lanka did not follow these rules of war.
In
the first photos of Issapria, she is dead, her clothes are stripped away from
her body, her hands are tied behind her back and her pants are pulled down, her
legs are spread. But in similar photos of her in this same place, she is
alternately positioned.
Either
way, dead women with their legs open and their clothing stripped away, who are
bound, are generally rape victims.
She
is photographed and videotaped initially it appears, where the murder likely
occurred. These are the images that show her with her hands bound behind her
back. They are backed up with video that Channel 4 used in ‘Sri
Lanka’s Killing Fields’ and it shows, very very clearly, that the girls who are
recently killed, are actually covered up to some degree when the video begins,
and then the clothes come off again to reveal their damaged, nude, dead
bodies.
The
defensive posturing of Sri Lankan nationalists is endless, as are the endless
denials by a network of Sinhalese Buddhist supporters who refuse to accept
evidence or even acknowledge the extremely obvious. Some, like Romesh
Senewirante, claim to know all about the war, yet he was in Australia when it
happened. Commenting on the new information and video, Sinewirante wrote:
A
comment from another (there are many) person using the name Dissanayake in my
last article about these images, suggests that these blatant photographs
represent legal war conduct.
“It
is an exaggeration to say that these video clips show any war crimes”, fails to
hit its mark.”
In
disagreement with my assessment, Dissanayake added:
It
is very understandable to remove cloths of female fighters because they may be
from suicide formations. It is dangerous to take all the dead bodies without
through search. I can remember the cloths of the male LTTE fighter who was the
pilot of the last suicide air attack near the Katunayake airport were removed
for searching of similar items. It was done in front of the magistrate.
These
are hard images to look at, but they tell more of a story now, than they did at
first. A London attorney named Vasuki Muruhathas, who represents an unnamed
Tamil war crime victim, recently acquired and released 32 new video clips of
captured and dead LTTE fighters.
It
is clip #28, at 2:56, that heavily indicts Sri Lanka in the death of
Issapria.
This video shows her body in a row of dead fighters, presumably
photographed for identification by the Sri Lankan Army.
Smoking
Gun
Even
in this video the photographer pauses and comments on her naked body. But the
thing that sets it apart, is that the young woman is not bound in these shots.
Her hands have been untied to make her appear as one more dead resistance
fighter, but we know that shortly before this, she was laying in a pool of blood
with her hands tied.
This
is where the deception of Sri Lanka’s government clearly enters the picture.
They really must have assumed their critics are dumb.
Several
things become clear:
Issapria
was captured alive or surrendered, or else she would not have been restrained.
Nobody ties the hands of a dead person, so she was alive at first.
The
positioning of her body; the nudity and seemingly depraved references to her
naked form recorded on video, indicate a state of sexual interest and
assault.
The
fact that her hands are untied and that she is laid in a row of corpses, proves
that the SLA tried to cause the viewer and consequently the world public, to
believe that her death was a legal act of war when it could not possibly have
been.
We
have the proof and there is no need to ask about whether war crimes took place,
indeed the only question left is ‘how many?’ This revelation brings hard reality
to Sri Lanka.
Donald
Gnanakone has been working with Vasuki Muruhathas to distribute this material
into the public channels and it is working. His contributions to
the Colombo Telegraph are both informative and revealing:
A
new video shows the LTTE media TV announcer Issapriya’s naked body lies with the
hundreds of dead bodies, but this time her hands are untied. The security forces
officer speaking in Sinhala language to a female says, “here, here, Voice of
Tiger announcer.” (Watch at 2.56mins in the below video) When
her dead body was photographed the first time , her hands were tied behind
her back and allegedly raped. -
www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/warning-disturbing-images-issapriyas-naked-body-with-tied-and-untied-hands/”> Exclusive
– Warning Disturbing Images: Issapriya’s Naked Body With Tied And Untied Hands –
Colombo Telegraph The video clearly demonstrates a pattern of woeful
consistency of the Sri Lankan forces. Most
of the female armed and unarmed combatants, and civilians are always stripped
naked or their underwear and down to their knees and the bras are either
missing or near their neck, exposing the breast of teenage girls or young women.
Only a few men are stripped naked.
I
did not know before, that Issapria would speak to us from the grave and point us
to irrefutable evidence, good enough to prove this point in any court. The real
tragedy is that her case is only one, and we are putting this together
largely because she is highly identifiable. I look at the other new video clips,
and compare them to the photos of slaughtered Tamil Tigers we are all supposed
to believe were “killed during combat operations” with the SLA. At this point
only Issapria is showing us proof positive evidence, but I suspect there is a
great deal more and it too will show itself to us eventually. At one point the
world will no longer be able to ignore this painful series of international
crimes and the reign of Majinda will come to a crashing close.
It
absolutely can not be avoided.
At
4:34 in this clip, we see the body of Issapria with her hands bound behind her
back.
Issapria’s
body is shown at 2:56 with her hands untied. Earlier images show her likely
where she was killed, with her hands tied behind her back.
There was a mass demonstration which was organized by JVP committee in the UK on 22 June 2012 to condemn the unlawful, murderous Rajapaksha regime in Sri Lanka. The family hierarchy of Rajapaksha is conducting abductions and killing people using underworld thugs and they killed two JVP members recently in Katuwana during a pocket meeting which was organized by Janatha vimukthi Peramuna. The mass demonstration was held in front of the Sri Lankan High Commission in the UK in spite of unfavorable weather conditions and the bus strike in London.
By Hannah Tennant-Moore 
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