The Kallarawa massacre was carried out by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the organisation which has been banned in 32 countries including the US, Australia, EU, India and Canada due to its terrorist activities on May 25, 1995.
This massacre occurred at a small fishing village called Kallarawa located on the Eastern seaboard of Sri Lanka. Kallarawa is located 35 kilometres away from Trincomalee town. The village was populated by migrant fishermen at the time of the attack. Kallarawa was known as an area which produces a good catch for fishermen. Those fishermen lived selling their fish.
The Kallarawa massacre took place on May 25, 1995 during which the LTTE cadres massacred 42 Sinhalese men, women and children in Kallarawa. Elderly, sick, disabled, pregnant mothers etc. were among them. All the remaining civilian survivors fled the village after this incident leading to its depopulation. However survivors from the Sinhalese and Muslim communities later returned to Kallarawa under the protection of the Sri Lankan Army.
In a letter to Amnesty International, the LTTE seemed to implicitly claim responsibility for the attack, stating that the village was part of the Government's war strategy and thus a legitimate target. Amnesty noted that there were no reports of firearms being used by the villagers, and thus concluded the massacre was a violation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL).
The barbaric LTTE cadres killed thousands of innocent poor people in Sri Lanka including Buddhist monks, priests belonging to all the other religions, elderly, patients, pregnant mothers, infants, scholars, politicians and many others. They used the most brutal way to kill them. They hacked them to death using swords and other weapons. The deaths were not sudden. The majority who died suffered for hours and hours exactly knowing that they would die without being able to get help from outside.
The villages located next to LTTE held areas were often called the ‘Border Villages’. The people living in those villages lived in fear of getting hacked to death by the LTTE at any moment 24 X 7. They never slept at night and they went into thick jungles with their elderly, sick, pregnant mothers, infants etc. to spend the night. Even pregnant mothers had to climb up to tree tops in order to spend the night and see the sunrise on the following day. They did everything possible to stay alive. Buddhist monks provided them psychological support by staying in those villages with people without leaving them. But sometimes the LTTE cadres found them from thick jungles and hacked them to death.
During that time office worker couples did not travel in the same bus or in the same train fearing for their lives. They wanted to save at least one parent, either mother or father to look after the children fearing one parent died from a sudden brutal bomb attack of the LTTE. Therefore they took separate ways to their offices and used separate transport modes to reach their offices in the morning and return home in the evening in the same way separately after work. Even travelling by a staff bus/van was not safe at that time and they were caught in the crossfire between the LTTE and the Armed Forces. Some employees who survived after Central Bank bombing in 1996 could not see the faces of their children after 1996 because they became blind due to the bomb blast. They could not see the faces of their grandchildren.
We must tell the children born after 1990 about the true status of Sri Lanka that existed before May 18, 2009. How bombs went off all over the country killing thousands of innocent poor people. How a handful of Sri Lankans assisted terrorists through whatever they did while the entire nation and majority of media pushed the country forward encouraging our War Heroes to rescue the country from barbaric LTTE terrorists who had aircraft, ships, modern arms of their own. Our children should know about the unofficial country located within Sri Lanka before May 18, 2009. Our children should know the real heroes of Mother Lanka and the handful of traitors of Mother Lanka. Otherwise we will not be able to walk towards a prosperous and united country.
The people born after 1990 have very little or no knowledge at all on the situation of Sri Lanka existed before May 18, 2009. They have no idea about the day-to-day life of an ordinary Sri Lankan by that time. The patriotic parents related the past situation to their children in order to make them realize how lucky they are to live a safe life in this precious land. But a few did not relate the history to their children and those children were not interested in finding out the true history of Sri Lanka before 2009.
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