Tamil villagers in Amparai marked 33 years since the Udumpankulam massacre this week, where commandos from Sri Lanka’s Special Task Force killed as many as 130 farmers.
Village residents held a special ceremony at the Thangavelauthapuram temple in remembrance of their loved ones on Tuesday, lighting lamps and holding prayers.
The massacre, on February 19, 1986, saw troops from the STF beat, hack and shoot to death farmers who were working in the Tamil hamlet.
Speaking to TamilNet in 2003, Nakamany Kandasamy, a survivor of the massacre, said,
“The threshing floor was full of burnt and half burnt bodies. It was an unbearable sight. A boy who escaped and hid in the jungle told us that some of the victims were alive when the soldiers set them on fire. Exactly five months later the military came here again and shot dead two men from the village, on 19 July 86.”
Three years after the massacre, those villagers who remained in Udumpankulam were then driven out en masse by the STF.
Read more of his testimony, and from other survivors, here.
As with many other massacres across the Tamil homeland, no one has been held accountable for the killings.
