Invitation to Sivaram memorail lecture Please forward

Taraki Siva ram or Dharmeratnam Siva ram (11 August 1959– 28 April 2005) was a popular Tamil journalist of Sri Lanka . He was kidnapped by four men in a white van on April 28, 2005, in front of the Bambalapityapolice station. His body was found the next day near the Parliament of Sri Lanka . He had been beaten and shot in the head. In 1982 Siva ram joined the Gandhian Movement, then a front organization for the People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam(PLOTE), one of the many Tamil organizations. After Sri Lanka ’s ethnic conflict erupted into civil war in 1983, Siva ram, under the alias SR, soon became a PLOTE militant. In 1988, a year after the Indo-Lankan accord was signed, Uma Maheswaran, PLOTE’s leader, appointed Siva ram General Secretary of the Democratic People’s Liberation Front (DPLF), the organization’s registered political party. Siva ram left PLOTE in 1989, over number of disagreements with Uma Maheswaran. In 1988 with the encouragement of fellow journalist, activist and actor Richard De Zoysa he became a reporter for the UN-funded Inter Press Service (IPS), for whom De Zoysa was a correspondent. In 1989, when The Island newspaper needed a political analyst, De Zoysa suggested Siva ram. The Island editor , Gamini Weerakon, proposed tharaka or star in Sinhalese as Sivaram’s pen name but a sub- editor accidentally printedTaraki instead, giving birth to Sivaram’s nom de plume. In 1990 Siva ram helped identify Richard De Zoysa’s body after De Zoysa was abducted from his home and killed For More Inform ation: Shan Thavarajah shanthavarajah@gmail.com Bahn Strasse 99 3008 Bern +4131 381 56 90 +4178 736 18 38