Thiagarajah Selvanithy (Tamil: செல்வநிதி தியாகராசா), also known as Selvi, was a Sri Lankan International PEN award winner in 1992, who was abducted and executed by the LTTE.
Biography
Selvi was born into a peasant family in Semamadu, a village about 80 miles south of Jaffna.
Activism
Selvi was a Tamil language poet from Jaffna in Sri Lanka.
She was the founder of a feminist journal called Tholi and was a gifted young poet who in her work deplored the carnage brought about by the Sri Lankan civil war. Selvi also produced two plays, one about dowry payments and the other about rapes.
At the time of her kidnapping, Selvi was a third-year student in Theater and Drama Arts in the University of Jaffna.
Abduction
On 30 August 1991, Selvi was arrested by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or LTTE, a rebel group fighting for independence for minority Sri Lankan Tamil people in Sri Lanka. The day before her abduction she was about to star in a play about the role of women in the Palestinian intifada. She was a prominent member of Poorani Illam, a women's center in Jaffna, which gives support to women traumatized by government bombing raids and bereavement.
Murder
In 1997, LTTE sources acknowledged that she was killed along with another dissident, one Manoharan, also a final year University student. Although their opposition to the LTTE was non-violent, they were both killed in the LTTE's prison camps.
See also
References
- "PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Awards". PEN American Center. Archived from the original on 25 August 2006. Retrieved 29 August 2020.
- UTHR(J) report on Selvy's death