The LTTE kill 13 soldiers in an armed ambush in Jaffna.
Sources
Report on the Presidential Truth Commission on Ethnic Violence (1981 – 1984), Volume I; S. Sharvananda, S. S. Sahabandu, M. M. Zuhair; September 2002; Sharpened Claws, Tim McGirk, Time Magazine, 9 February 1998.
Quotations
“The New Tigers, renamed the LTTE in 1976, survived on robbing banks, killing policemen and stealing their weapons, and fighting rival Tamil militant groups. Whenever the police were closing in on him, Prabhakaran and his boys slipped over to India’s Tamil Nadu state, smuggled in with help from boyhood friends. In 1983, the gang killed 13 soldiers in an ambush near Jaffna. He and his cohorts fled to Tamil Nadu…” Sharpened Claws, Tim McGirk, Time Magazine, 9 February 1998.
Q: “Why did you stage the July ambush? There are various versions afloat. According to some, it was an act of reprisal as four Tamil women who had been raped. Based on my investigations I felt that you had to prove a point to the Sinhalese army who were jubilant over the death of your close associate, Charles Anthony, leader of the military wing on 15 July. The point, I guess that you had to assert was that the LTTE despite the loss of one of its ablest leaders was still strong and capable of take on the Sinhalese army. Is this theory correct?”
A: “There is an element of truth to your findings about Charles Anthony and the ambush. The attack was partly in retaliation, a punishment to the Sinhala army. But still we feel that the lives of 13 soldiers cannot compensate the life of a great revolutionary and freedom fighter like Charles. The ambush was also a part of the guerrilla warfare directed against the enemy,” Velupillai Prabhakaran, leader of the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam (LTTE), interview with Anita Pratap, March 1984, Sunday Magazine, India 11-17 March 1984.
“On the night of 23rd July, around 11.30pm, 13 soldiers on a routine patrol in the North traveling in a jeep and a truck, came under terrorists attack and all 13 soldiers were killed. This was at this time the largest number of army men killed so far in any incident in the North. News of the killing spread instantly on Sunday in the country,” Report on the Presidential Truth Commission on Ethnic Violence (1981 – 1984), Volume I; S. Sharvananda, S. S. Sahabandu, M. M. Zuhair; September 2002.
Related events
24 July 1983
23 July 2001
kannan said,
The report of the Presidential Truth Commission on Ethnic Violence (1981 – 1984) talks about how the army in Jaffna, in revenge for the killing of the 13 soldiers, killed 10 Tamil civilians on Sunday, 24 July 1983. By the evening, there were a total of 51 reprisal killings of Tamil civilians.
News of these killings by government forces never appeared in print, in contrast to the way the killing of the 13 soldiers had been widely reported.
Evidence was placed before the Commission that if the news of these reprisals had been published, the riots may have been avoided. But incredibly, the country’s media went silent on the fact that 51 (Tamil civilians) had already been killed in response to the killing of the 13 (Sinhalese soldiers).
The question that the Commission grappled with was why the government failed to use on Sunday the censorship that it had brought into force only the previous Wednesday, to prevent a country-wide splash of the news of the killing of the 13 soldiers? This was a question that Sarath Muttetuwegama MP raised in Parliament on 4 August 1983. The Commission argued that “in as much as publicity for the reprisal killing of 51 soldiers could have saved the unfortunate events that followed, the censorship of the death of 13 soldiers could have equally well prevented the cycle of events that ensued.”