Chelvy Thiyagarajah


Thiagarajah Selvanithy or from Sri Lanka an 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. A third-year student in Theater and Drama Arts in the University of Jaffna.
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.

Abduction

On August 30, 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.

Execution

In 1997, LTTE sources acknowledged that she was executed along with another dissident, one Manoharan, also a final year University student. Although their opposition to the LTTE was non-violent, they were both executed in the LTTE's prison camps.