Dharman Wickremaratne, in the Daily News, where the title is “JVP uprising II killed 396 undergrads, while 227 students disappeared”… http://www.dailynews.lk/?q=features/jvp-uprising-ii-killed-396-undergrads-while-227-students-disappeared
DJV Slogans calling for the death of President Jayewardene (“Let’s kill J.R.”) written on walls
The second JVP insurgency began in 1986. Two were killed on May 1, 1987 when the banned May Day was commemorated. The insurrection was baptized near the Bo Tree, Pettah on July 28, 1987. The first to die there was Moratuwa University Engineering student Clifford Perera. The writer saw him lying on the ground with fatal gunshot injuries. The two of us studied in the same school. A brilliant student in the engineering field he was drawn to the JVP by Sudath, a second year student of the Colombo University’s Medical Faculty. I remember in the same group were Hiranya, Asiri, and Godagampola among several others.
Clifford was dying. His last words were: “Motherland or death.” No one dared to rush to the spot because gunfire was heard from all directions. When I appealed to Pathegama Mathupala, the caretaker of the pro-JVP Samastha Lanka Trade Union Federation, he responded promptly. He carried Clifford with the help of another. The next moment a bullet struck Mathupala’s hand. As soon as our photographer Chandrasiri Weerasinghe took a photo of the scene, we left the place. Continue reading →
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Fifty years after the signing of the controversial India-Sri Lanka Agreement on the citizenship of nearly one million Indian Origin Tamils (IOT) in Sri Lanka, the community is seeing it as a blessing in disguise and not as a tragedy. The pact, signed by Prime Ministers Lal Bahadur Shastri and Sirimavo Bandaranaike in 1964, unjustly apportioned the IOT (mostly ill-paid workers in the island’s tea and rubber plantations) between the two countries without consulting them. Continue reading 
