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Uruthirapuram commemorates 4th February with a ‘Difference’

Uruthirapuram, an agricultural hinterland in Kilinochchi, a sleepy little hamlet, commemorates the 14th anniversary of the nine innocent civilians killed in an aerial bombing by the Sri Lankan Air Force Jet fighters on 4th February 1991.

It was another day for the peasantry in the agricultural hinterland, Uruthirapuram. Nine in the morning, especially in the month of February, the paddy farmers are already in the fields looking at the paddy stalks that are crowned with the bunch of golden grains, with affection and admiration of parents looking at the growing children. They were not waging a war and therefore did not expect ‘an enemy fighter jet’ to drop deadly bombs on their heads.

Naïve they were that the Sri Lankan Air Force jet pilots made a judgement that these were a band of ‘terrorists’ and they did drop the fatal bomb killing those poor peasants who were in fact ‘talking’ to the paddy stalks soliciting support to hold the grains in tact till harvest that was to take place in a few days hence.

The farm hands that would have been there at the time of the harvest to thrash the paddy and collect them in gunnies, did collect in gunnies not paddy, but bits and pieces, the dead remains of the farmers on this fateful day, 4th February 1991 at a time when the farmers in the south of the island were commemorating the ‘Independence Day’ of Sri Lanka.

Uruthirapuram peasantry erected a memorial tomb for the nine of their brethren killed brazenly by the state arm of security with impunity, for no offence committed other than being born as Tamils. The rural folks of Uruthirapuram, while commemorating this killing every year on the 4th of February in a simple religious ceremony, do ask God Almighty whether the offenders and their masters would stand trial in His Court on the Day of Judgement for this and other crimes against humanity on a selective basis. Today, 4th February 2005 at 0900, this commemoration took place in the centre of the village where the memorial stands, reminding the Tamil peasantry of discriminatory governance and indiscriminate killing.

04 February 2005

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