The terrorist attacks onthe Kent and Dollar farmsin the Mullaitivu and Vavu-niya district have seriouslyembarrassed the northernterrorists who found eventheir supporters in TamilNadu unhappy about thekillings.

A governmentspokesman said in Colom-bo yesterday that LTTEhad issued a statement inTamil Nadu, asking theirpeople in the North not togive poster and other pub-licity to that attack.

“There is criticism ofthat incident even in TamilNadu, because of thekilling of civilians”, thespokesman said.

Terrorist boatsdestroyed

Meanwhile, a cracker-lighting mob descended ona fishing wadiya at Talima-nar on Sunday night, chas-ing away the fishermenand setting fire to thewadiya, government mediaspokesman, WickremaWeerasooria, said yester-day.

He said police had firedinto the mob and one per-son in it was killed.

The fishermen had cometowards Talimannar follow-ing the arrival of the mobat their wadiya. There wasno information of the num-ber of huts burned, thespokesman said.

He also said that Tamilfishermen in the Mannararea had reported the land-ing of two unknown boats.The persons who hadarrived in them appearedto have vanished into thejungle. The security forces,who destroyed the boats,were combing the junglesfor the visitors, thespokesman said.

He also reported thearrest on Sunday of 16 sus-pected terrorists, takeninto custody by soldiers ofthe Palaly camp. They arebelieved to be members ofthe Eelam People’s Revolu-tionary Liberation Front(EPRLF).

The authorities alsoreported the arrest on Sun-day of a young tamil, aged

26, taken in on suspicionby an airport security offi-cial. The suspect, whohailed from Negombo, wasin possession of some“very revealing docu-ments”.

They also found a smalldiary on him. “There wasinformation in it which isconsidered to be signifi-cant breakthrough. TheCID has taken over theinvestigation”, thespokesman said.

He also reported thatcombing-out operations onthe Kent farm area werecontinuing and “12 moreterrorists have been killedin the jungle. It’s a vast jun-gle. I didn’t realise what itwas like until I saw a filmof it”, the spokesman said.

They were poor butwere prepared tolive working hard

supporting their families.Therefore, they had workedhard on their farmlands atDollar and Kent at Mul-laitivu but when dusk fellon the two villages thatwere named farms, forsome reason on the secondday of December 1984 thetired workers had gone tosleep.

Yet none of them knewthat would be the last sleepthey would fall into andnever wake up again.

At dawn on Friday mywife woke me up saying sheheard the report of a gun-shot. She took our two chil-dren and ran out of thehouse. After some minutesI saw a group of armed peo-ple running. They shot ather and she was hit on theleg, fell down. I took thetwo children and rantowards the shed wherebags of rice were stored andhid with the children. TheTigers came there and setfire to the shed and askedus to come out. My clotheshad caught fire but I tookthe two children and start-ed running out towards thecattle shed and hid there.Later, I heard that the ter-rorists had killed my wifeand my elder son, RanmuniSugathadasa who was oneof the survivors of theLTTE terrorist attack onthe Kent Farm Padaviya, inMullativu, twenty five yearsago recalled.

At Dollar Farm where wewere working, we heard agun shot and came out ofour houses. We experi-enced a fear that we hadnever been felt that day.Therefore, we ran towardsthe chilli plantation and hidthere but gradually weheard gunshots now nearerto where we were hidingand we saw a group ofarmed persons running.Later they came towardsthe place where we werehiding. They asked us tocome out with our handsheld high. They thenordered us to get into ourhouses and again and againthey ordered us in and outof the houses. They wereshouting anti-governmentslogans also in between.

They ordered us to bringall the kerosene oil or petrolwe had in the houses. Theycollected all the tractorsand agricultural imple-ments and set fire to thehouses.

They left with the trac-tors and the other thingsand I saw they had killedmy son before they left,Lucyhamy Perera, one ofthe survivors of the Dollarfarm recalled.

On that day at dawn theLTTE terrorists who hadraided the Kent and DollarFarms at Padaviya had shotat random and most of thepeople fell dead and theothers who survived wereeither injured or hiding in

fear attempted to creep intothe woods but some failedin their attempt to escapedeath as the terrorists intheir numbers had sur-rounded the two farmsblocking all the escaperoutes.

The terrorists then heldthose who were trying toflee and tied them up.Demonstrating their sav-agery, the terrorists urinat-ed on the people who weretied up. Later they shot orhacked to death the help-less people displaying theirbrutal mindsets.

At the end of the carnage33 people of the DollarFarm and 29 people of theKent Farm were dead butlater others who had notbeen killed instantly alsosuccumbed to their injuriesand the final count was 65men, women and childreneach one unarmed had diedin the terrorists brutal

attack on those civilians.This was the largest num-ber of unarmed civiliansthat the LTTE terroristshad killed in the first fewyears of their killing spree.

In the early 1970s whenTamil terrorist groups werein their formative stage thefirst Tamil civilian to bekilled was a driver Ula-ganathan. From then onthey started killing civiliansthey thought were infor-mants or those who helpedthe police. They killedpolicemen and others butthey never had the strengthto attack human settle-ments until they turned onthe Kent and

Dollar Farms brutality inits extreme, hacking todeath little children, help-less old women or the oldpeople without exception.

Kent Farm and DollarFarm were in fact not farmsbut settlements under the

Padaviya irrigation scheme– they were villages.Though the LTTE terror-ists, their sympathizers andpolitical apologists termthese settlements ascolonies these were ancientsettlements, the villages ofthe Sinhalese from veryancient times the very wordPadaviya is a Sinhaleseplace name but to theLTTE who had their ownwarped mind and a cookedup history, these places hadto fall into their imaginaryhomeland, Eelam.

The first act of genocidethen was committed inPadaviya though the twovillages were given namesof foreign extraction. TheLTTE described the attackin one of their publicationsas led by Captain Lawrence(Sivalingam) and Lt. Ravi(Karmarasa) who were spe-cially trained in guerillacombat operations. The

group of terrorists had sud-denly left for Kokilai lagoonand they started firing theirmachine guns continuously

The incident reported bythe LTTE takes place on aday important for Prab-hakaran May 5,1976 whenhe had given the membersof his terrorist outfit a ‘codeof conduct’ or rules.

The first of these ruleswas that none in the outfitcould have love affairs. Butby 1984 Prabhakaran him-self had violated the rule byhaving a love affair with ayoung woman undergradu-ate Madivadini whom helater married in Chennai onOctober 1 but when the endof that month was reachedhe had ordered the mas-sacre of the two villagesjust in the first two monthsas a newly married mankilling 65 innocentunarmed civilians – geno-cide. W.N

DNFEATURES

From the Daily NewsArchives-- PPaarrtt 44

LTTE genocide atKent and Dollar Farms

LLTTTTEE vviioollaatteedd rriigghhtt ttoo lliiffee

The first act of geno-cide by the LTTEterrorists in early

December 1984 was at twovillages in Padaviya,named Kent Farm and Dol-lar Farm killing 65 Sin-halese villagers includingchildren and women andmen burning down theirhomes and stocks of ricebrought out the reality ofwhat they called a war ofliberation.

The thin veneer of thepretence of being freedomfighters as the terroristscalled themselves had beenpierced and torn to shredsby the most heinous andbloodthirsty acts commit-ted by all the Tamil Tigeroutfits starting from thefirst ones like the ENDLF,EROS, EPRLF or PLOTE

yet the brutality of theLTTE always surpassedthat of all other racist ter-rorist groups of this coun-try.

One had to recall thatthe LTTE more than otherterrorist groups enjoyedthe patronage of foreignorganizations and govern-ments mainly due to politi-cal blunders committed bymediocre political leadersin Colombo even when itwas known that India wasthe clandestine patronhelping the terroristgroups.

However, more thanattacking the ArmedForces or the police it wasrecorded that the LTTEheld expertise in killinginnocent unarmed civiliansin larger and larger num-bers after they killed the65 people at the Kent and

Dollar Farm villages. Atthat time the so-calledhuman rights activists orpolitical leaders like RanilWickremesinghe who hadearned a reputation forcalling for the protection ofhuman rights - though it iswell-known that he was aminister of the governmentthat had the worst recordof violation of humanrights with around 50,000people who involuntarilydisappeared in 1988-89-90– the champions of humanrights were notable absen-tees! The local and interna-tional NGOs like theHuman Rights Watchappeared out of theirwatch about the gross andbrutal genocide by theLTTE.

The hypocrisy of mostwest European nations andcertain individuals of influ-

ence in those country wasalso a clearly visible factor.In fact before the Kent andDollar Farm massacre tookplace a tutor of politics atRuskin College, OxfordDavid Selborne who wasone of the British propa-gandists of the LTTE ter-rorists had told the Illus-trated Weekly of India in1982 “Vavuniya not Jaffnais the front line of theTamil struggle and for thisbattlefield they will not bedefeated.”

It was very clear that theBritish who had harped onviolation of human rightsduring the recently con-cluded humanitarian opera-tions demonstrated politi-cal and diplomatic duplici-ty as they continued tokeep Anton Balasingham,the internationalspokesman of the LTTE

terrorist even after it wasbanned by their govern-ments amply showing thatthe British governmentswere not sincere in theirattitude towards their for-mer colonies.

Writing to a LTTE organTamil Information fromVavuniya, Selborne said“We have started movingtowards liberation” quotinga squatter village headmana former plantation worker.It was very interesting tonote that he quoted withthe cat out of the bag theso-called squatter villageheadman a former planta-tion worker as the WesternNations and their agenciesnot only Selborne had beenhand in glove with theracist terrorists preparingthe ground work for theirfuture plans and Vavuniyathe district in which

Padaviya is located wasover a long period of timeprepared as the base forterrorists activity.

Though little knownfrom the late 1970s groupsof people, families andindividuals from the plan-tation sector were broughtto Vavuniya district andsettled in temporary shacksor houses put up for them.It was well-known that theINGO Redd Barna spon-sored this settlement ofsquatters and Selborne andother west European busy-bodies were engaged inthis covert and illegal oper-ation in the North andaround 50,000 people fromthe plantation sector weresettled after 1977 especial-ly in and around Vavuniyawhere large extents ofbare lands were available.Once the terrorists espe-

cially the LTTE started itsactivities – bloodletting ofinnocents – the Sinhaleseand later the Muslims wereto be chased out.

The grandiose plan of theLTTE with the main strate-gy of ethnic cleansingwould have been achievedespecially with their Euro-pean godfathers planningand playing covert butimportant roles to assistthe racist terrorists evenwhen these countries andindividuals knew that theiractivities would threatenthe lives of the people anddestabilize the economy ofa country that had closeand friendly diplomatic oreven cultural ties with someof those godfather nations.

Therefore, the strategyof the LTTE that attackedthe two villages killing 65civilians was aimed at

instilling fear into the Sin-halese at that time forcingthem to leave the Vavu-niya district so that theycould strengthen them-selves to build their sepa-rate Tamil state. With thesquatters from the upcoun-try plantation people ofIndian origin settled there,the next strategy of the ter-rorists groups, not only theLTTE was to get those peo-ple too to join what theycalled the liberation strug-gle of the Tamils. Theattack on Sinhala villageswas followed by acts ofgenocide where thousandsof unarmed Sinhalese andMuslim civilians were killedwith no internationalhuman rights groups orINGOs coming even to con-demn such atrocious crimesof violating even the rightto life.

WIJITHA NAKKAWITA

Infamous July 1983 pogrom

Yesterday

CHRONOLOGY OF LTTE TERROR

Distraught: Carrying the dead body of his son killed at Kent Farm

Play down fishing village attacks, advises Tigers

Even Tamil Nadu unhappy

Civilian killings smear terrorists

The government yesterday imposed a curfew inAnuradhapura and Ja-Ela.

The curfew in Anuradhapura was operativefrom 6 p.m. yesterday. It will end at 6 a.m. today.

In Negombo and Ja-Ela AGA’s divisions the cur-few was effective from 5 p.m. yesterday. It willend at 6 a.m. today.

In Jaffna, Kilinochchi and Mullaltivu the curfewwas operative from 4 p.m. yesterday till 6 a.m.today.

In Mannar, Batticaloa and Vavuniya the curfewcame into force at 8 p.m. yesterday. It will end at6 a.m. today.

The curfew which began at 6 p.m. yesterday inthe AGA’s division of Tirukkovil and Akkaraipattuwill end at 6 a.m. today.

Curfew in A’pura, Ja-Ela