COLOMBO: Twenty years have passed, and yet no one in Sri Lanka knows for sure who in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) ordered the coldblooded massacre of 630 Sinhalese and Muslim policemen in the eastern province in June 1990, after the cops had meekly surrendered and laid down their arms.
The long forgotten issue was brought to the fore earlier this week when members of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) asked former Tiger cadre and the current Chief Minister of the eastern province, Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan alias Pillayan, if he would apologise for the massacre.
Pillayan replied that he had nothing to do with the incident as he joined the LTTE only in February 4, 1991. If there was anyone who should apologise, it had to be Karuna Amman, former Commander of the LTTE in Batticaloa and Amparai districts, where the murders took place, he added.
Talking to the The Island daily on this, Karuna, who is now Deputy Minister of Rehabilitation in the Rajapaksa government, said he was not in the East at that time but in Jaffna. Those in charge of the East then were Pottu Amman, Karikalan and Newton, he said.
All three are now untraceable and probably dead. The body of Pottu Amman was not found at the end of Eelam War IV. Karikalan was last seen being put on a bus by the army after he surrendered. And Newton is believed to have disappeared from Colombo in 2005 where he was on a mission to kill Karuna, who had defected from the LTTE a year earlier.
According to Thurairatnam of the Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF) in Batticalao, Karuna was not in the East at the time of the incident.
"The man then in charge was Newton who had very close, direct relations with Prabhakaran," he told Express. He added that the man who might have had a direct hand in the killing was Reagan, second in command to Karuna as well as Newton.
It was Reagan who surrounded the Batticaloa police station and forced the policemen to surrender. Thurairatnam said Reagan did it because the army had killed his family in Wellavali.
But veteran Lankan journalist D B S Jeyaraj, writing in The Sunday Leader on March 7, 2004, said Karuna had taken charge of Batticaloa "shortly before the IndiaSri Lanka Accord of July 1987."
In his testimony before the LLRC, veteran Tamil scribe K T Rajasingham had hinted that Karuna had had a hand in the massacre. Without mentioning Karuna's name, he said the government had rewarded people who had committed "heinous crimes" with Parliament seats and ministerial positions.