Richard de Zoysa, journalist, author and human rights activist, is abducted and murdered.

At the time of his abduction, de Zoysa was the head of the Colombo office of the International Press Service. On 18 February 1990, an armed group broke into his mother’s house, and forcibly removed de Zoysa. The next day, de Zoysa’s body was found in the sea at Moratuwa, some 12 miles south of Colombo. He had been shot in the head and the throat, and his jaw had been broken. His body was identified by his journalist friend Taraki Sivaram, who was assassinated in 2006.

In 2005, two police officers were indicted for de Zoysa’s murder, but all were acquitted on 9 November 2005 by the Colombo High Court, ruling that the evidence presented by the prosecution was “contradictory and not credible”.

Richard de Zoysa was posthumously awarded the International Press Service Award in 1990. This award was established in 1985 to honour outstanding accomplishments in international journalism, promoting democracy and human rights.

Sources
‘Assassinated Journalists’, Free Media Sri Lanka; Insurrectionary Violence in Sri Lanka: The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna Insurgencies of 1971 and 1987-1989, Tisaranee Gunasekara, Ethnic Studies Report, ICES, Vol. XVII, No. 1, January 1999;

Quotations

“In A Lost Generation, Prins Gunasekara has a very interesting story to tell—that when he met de Zoysa’s mother, Dr Manorani Saravanamuttu, she did not believe that Premadasa had anything to do with her son’s murder. On the contrary she had believed that it “was the handywork of some jealous persons in the Premadasa administration, like Ranjan Wijeratne, acting independently of President Premadasa. It may even be some old school feud carried too far. At least that is what Manorani Saravanamuttu told me… I told her it was alright telling me about her disbelief in Premadasa’s involvement but she should not voice such naïve statements elsewhere, as her own credibility would be doubted,” Insurrectionary Violence in Sri Lanka: The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna Insurgencies of 1971 and 1987-1989, Tisaranee Gunasekara.

“Had he lived, Richard de Zoysa would have been fifty on March 13th this year. He died eighteen years ago, almost the last victim of a period of abductions and killings about which there were hardly any protests at the time, except from a relatively small group of political activists opposed to the government. … The government of the time was after all the chosen instrument of the elite, that still makes decisions, that still constitutes the lens through which much of the West looks at us, and they had had no great problem with President Premadasa’s suppression of the JVP. … But Richard was himself a member of that elite, the scion of two long established families, one Sinhala, the other Tamil. Even though there were crude attempts to justify the killing – leaks about him belonging to the JVP, readings in Parliament from his diary in an attempt to suggest that his sexual proclivities had something to do with the death – in the end it was crystal clear that the government had gone too far. Certainly, it was almost immediately after his death that, his mother would say, Ranjan Wijeratne called the death squads together and told them, at a party at the BMICH she claimed, that their impunity was now over, they would have immunity for anything they had thus far done, but for the future they were on their own. My own view, which I have expressed elsewhere, and most recently in ‘The Limits of Love’, albeit fictionally, is that President Premadasa took advantage of the murder to call a halt to the killings that he had begun to feel were unnecessary now. In that sense, Richard’s murder was not in vain,” Dr. Rajiva Wijesinha, Daily Mirror, 13 March 2008.

Related events
13 November 1989
21 September 1989
August 1987

This event was the subject of a feature: Assassination of an activist.