Sri Lankan journalist Richard de Zoysa was killed in 1990.
A journalism fellowship was recently announced in honour of Richard De Zoysa Sri Lankan journalist, author and poet, human rights activist and actor killed in 1990 and Tamil journalist Subramaniam Sivanayagam.
Subramaniam Sivanayagam
On September 21, 2013, Sri Lankans Without Borders in partnership with the Centre for Policy Alternatives will announce the launch of the De Zoysa-Sivanayagam 2014 Fellowship in Digital Journalism. The partners will jointly select one candidate for a six-month fellowship with Groundviews, based out of Colombo, Sri Lanka.
In February 18, 1990, an armed group of men broke into De Zoysa’s family home and forcibly abducted him in front his mother. The following day, his dead body was found washed ashore on a beach in the outskirts of Colombo. He was 32 at the time of his death.
Sivanayagam was a witness to the political and social history of Sri Lanka that led to his imprisonment, at different times, by the Governments of Sri Lanka and India before he finally sought asylum in Europe for a number of years. He subsequently returned to Sri Lanka and died of natural causes in Colombo on November 29, 2010.
