Twenty years without justice for murdered journalist Taraki Sivaram in Sri Lanka

This story is published in collaboration with the Free Media Movement of Sri Lanka, part of a series for Black January, which commemorates crimes against Sri Lanka's journalists. It has been translated and edited from Tamil, with updates on Dharmeratnam Sivaram’s case. 

On 28 April 2025, journalists from the Jaffna Press Club held a discussion and commemoration event in memory of Dharmeratnam Sivaram, better known as ‘Taraki’, in which they highlighted the disproportionate targeting of Tamil journalists and media workers for their reporting, and called upon the Sri Lankan government to expedite investigations into his killing. A similar event was held in Colombo on 5 May. During the Jaffna gathering, journalists recalled that in October 2024, the Public Security Minister called to expedite investigations into several open cases, including Sivaram’s case. In January 2025, after the election of the National People’s Power government, the Cabinet Spokesperson Nalinda Jayatissa also said that the Criminal Investigation Department was re-opening investigations into the killings and disappearances of several journalists, including Sivaram. The minister also said that the government was ready to take necessary measures to protect the personal safety and freedom of all journalists in the country. Yet this is cold comfort to Sivaram’s family, given that 20 years later, there has been little progress in his case. 

Sivaram was abducted on 28 April 2005 at 10.30 pm in front of Bambalapitiya police station in Colombo. Police found his body four hours later near the Kimbula-Ela junction, close to the banks of the Diyawanna Oya (lake), and just 500 metres from the parliament building. An inquest concluded that he died of gunshot wounds sometime between 12.30 and 1.00 am on 29 April. Sivaram’s abduction and murder sent shock waves throughout Sri Lanka and overseas. When marking World Press Freedom Day a few days later in Senegal, the UNESCO Director General Koïchiro Matsuura called Sivaram’s death a “shameful crime”.

Sivaram was born on 11 August 1959 in Batticaloa to Maheswariamma and Puvirajakeerthi Dharmaretnam, an upper-middle class family with significant landholdings in the Eastern Province. He completed his primary education at St Michael’s College in Batticaloa and later moved to Pembroke and Aquinas College in Colombo. An avid reader since childhood, Sivaram pioneered the formation of the Batticaloa Readers’ Circle in 1980.

He was admitted to the University of Peradeniya in central Sri Lanka in September 1981, where he studied for an English degree for two years. As a student, he was a member of the Gandhian Movement, which was widely described as a front for the Tamil militant group People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE). Sivaram was increasingly involved in the Gandhian Movement until the United National Party-led government began cracking down on its leadership, with several arrested and imprisoned. Among those killed during the Black July anti-Tamil pogrom of 1982 were several of Sivaram’s associates from the Gandhian Movement. They were murdered by Sinhalese inmates during the Welikada Prison massacre in Colombo in July 1983, in which at least 50 Tamil prisoners were killed over two days. Deeply impacted by these losses, Sivaram abandoned his university education after Black July, eventually joining PLOTE that year. 

Sivaram held key roles in both PLOTE’s military and political wings. In 1988, a year after the signing of the Indo-Lankan Accord, he was appointed General Secretary of the Democratic People’s Liberation Front, PLOTE’s registered political party. However, he left PLOTE in 1989 due to his disagreement with the PLOTE leader Uma Maheswaran’s attempts to build relations with the leftist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna party. His distaste for PLOTE’s involvement in an attempted coup to overthrow the Maldivian president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom’s regime in 1988, and the steady losses of PLOTE’s cadres and camps to the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) also played a part. 

IN 1988, Sivaram married Herly Yogaranjini, better known as Bhavani, in Batticaloa. After Sivaram's murder, his wife, two daughters Vaitheki and Vaishnavi, and son Seralaathan migrated to Canada, where they now live. Sivaram first received the opportunity to work for the Inter Press Service through his relationship with journalist Richard de Zoysa, who was a correspondent there. Through this, Sivaram transitioned from militancy and politics to journalism. In 1989, when The Island newspaper was looking for a Tamil political analyst, de Zoysa suggested Sivaram once again. They remained close friends – in 1990, Sivaram was among those who helped identify de Zoysa after he was abducted and murdered. 

It was at The Island that Sivaram’s pen name, ‘Taraki’, was born from a typo, as the editor Gamini Weerakoon had initially suggested the name ‘Tharakki’ (possibly a variant of the word ‘tharaka’ (star) in Sinhala). Both laughed at the typo that appeared in print thanks to a sub-editor, as it was also the name of the Afghan journalist, politician and founding member of the Marxist-Leninist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, Nur Muhammad Taraki, but the name stuck. 

Sivaram’s work under that name immediately drew a wide audience, as he reported on Sri Lanka’s civil war combining inside information with what the anthropologist Mark Whitaker, who later wrote a biography on Sivaram, described as a dispassionate yet ironic style. Weerakoon recalled that the first column Sivaram wrote was titled “Military Strategies of the Tamil National Army”.“It created a stir in political, military, diplomatic, journalistic and NGO circles,” he wrote. Weerakoon added that he never had to drastically edit Sivaram’s work for the entire duration of his stint at The Island. Although his articles were occasionally controversial for his support of Tamil nationalism, Sivaram’s political columns were widely read and praised for their depth of information and research, the journalist D B S Jeyaraj writes.

Following The Island, Sivaram wrote for a variety of newspapers including the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Times. He later wrote in Tamil under the name D Sivaram for the Tamil newspaper Virakesari. Additionally, he freelanced for the North Eastern Herald, which he co-founded with the journalist J S Tissainayagam in 2001, and was a senior editor for the Tamil nationalist TamilNet website, dedicated to news on issues concerning Tamils in Sri Lanka. Due to his popularity, his work also gained him enemies. A senior producer at the BBC Sinhala, Chandana Keerthi Bandara, wrote that when Sivaram received an anonymous threat calling him and three other journalists “traiters” (sic) and “spies” in 2000, he opted to stay behind in Sri Lanka while the other journalists fled the country. In 2004, when the journalist Aiyathurai Nadesan was killed and two other journalists from the East of Sri Lanka chose to flee the country, Sivaram once again chose to stay behind. When urged to leave Sri Lanka by his friends out of concern for his safety, he would often reply, “Where else would I die but here?”