Sri Lanka gained independence from Britain in 1948, but colonial strategies of divide and rule had left a cancerous legacy. "I would like to fuck it again," says an off-camera Sinhalese voice. Isaipriya and Gunalingam have been stripped naked-apparently raped-and then executed. They are in custody, their arms tied behind their backs.Īnd then there is a final terrible video, shot by a Sri Lankan soldier on his cell phone as a grotesque war trophy. Since then more photographs have emerged showing her and a 19-year-old woman named Ushalini Gunalingam, who had been captured with her. She is uninjured, but partially naked, distressed, disorientated, and being half-dragged, half-helped, from the shallow waters of a lagoon. In the 48-second-long tape, Isaipriya is still alive. I received proof of that lie four years later, in the form of a grainy video showing the capture of Isaipriya by Sri Lankan government soldiers. The problem is that-like so much claimed by the Sri Lankan government, then and since-it was a lie. The spelling had changed-and she'd been given the military rank of lieutenant colonel-but the message was clear: Isaipriya had died in action. Isaipriya was listed as a casualty of war. On May 19, 2009, the day after the official end of the war, the Sri Lankan Ministry of Defense posted on its website its regular war report, recording the deaths of senior Tamil Tiger officers.
SRI LANKAN TAMIL ACTRESS PHOTOS SERIES
What began as a series of reports has evolved through two TV documentaries into a full-length feature documentary, No Fire Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka. This war would be filmed in terrible detail-and for the past few years, with the help of exiled Sri Lankan journalists, diaspora Tamils, and survivors of the war, my colleagues at the UK's Channel 4 News and I have been compiling, analyzing, and authenticating this evidence. But there were witnesses, survivors and perpetrators alike, and they had cameras and cell phones. With the UN expelled and international journalists banned, the Sri Lankan government hoped and believed that what would happen over the next 138 days, as they made a push into Tiger-held territory, would remain a secret-a war without witnesses. He was about to launch the final offensive against the Tigers, and he didn't want any international observers. In reality, Rajapaksa wasn't concerned one bit about the safety of the UN staffers. In October 2008, the UN ordered Dix and the other few remaining international staffers out of the region after the Sri Lankan government, led by President Mahinda Rajapaksa, declared it could no longer guarantee their safety. "She was incredibly gentle and respectful," he said, "but at the same time, she stood for and symbolized the movement of the Tigers, which was hard and brutal and completely focused on their objective of gaining Tamil Eelam and an independent state within Sri Lanka." Dix knew Isaipriya, and he understood the moral ambiguity of her message. "She was a lovely woman," said Benjamin Dix, who for four years was a UN staffer in Kilinochchi, the administrative capital of the Tiger state. Isaipriya was respected and admired, not just by the people of the Vanni-the small region in north Sri Lanka where the secessionist forces of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had created a de facto state-but also by Tamils around the world, driven from their homeland by decades of discrimination, which occasionally exploded into outright pogroms among the Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka. She was beautiful, and she read the news on Tiger television and performed in romantic Tamil musicals, singing the praises of Tamil Tiger war heroes and the Black Tiger suicide bombers who raced their explosive-packed speedboats into the vulnerable sides of Sri Lankan Navy ships.
To the Tamils of northeast Sri Lanka and to much of their global diaspora, Isaipriya was a star: a presenter and actress who came to symbolize the Tamil resistance.
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