Eleven months after the bloody war in Sri Lanka that led to the complete rout of the LTTE amid intense civilian suffering, a great piece of journalism shook the conscience of the world: The Cage, authored by Gordon Weiss who was the UN spokesperson in the country at the time.
Written with arresting clarity of purpose and a racy style, The Cage unequivocally overturned the Sri Lankan government’s stand that there were no civilian deaths in the final days of the war. Besides the vivid description of the final phase of the war with chilling details of brutality, suffering and deaths, it provided an incredible perspective of the genesis, evolution and the culmination of the deep-rooted rift between the Tamil and Sinhala sentiments in Sri Lanka, that found violent expression in the decades long civil war.
The extensive references, meticulous documentation, the bold way of directly naming people like the Rajapaksas, and the unrestrained narration of the unique instruments of oppression in Sri Lanka make the book a gripping, but tormenting experience.
It was The Cage along with a sensational Channel Four Documentary (The Killing Fields) that exposed the veil of secrecy behind the war. The book also provided context for the UN Panel report and has been accepted as a reliable account of what exactly happened during the final days of the war in 2009, when a tiny piece of piece of land in the North of Sri Lanka was under siege by military forces. It is prescribed reading in many universities.
Weiss has worked as a journalist and with international organisations, particularly in several conflict and disaster hotspots for two decades now. Committed to a non-partisan stand, he is equally severe in his views on the LTTE. So much so that a Tamil nationalist group recently disrupted the launch of the Tamil version of his book in Chennai, prompting Arundhati Roy, who was present at the event, to say “annihilation of debate is annihilation of politics.”
Firstpost spoke to Gordon Weiss in Sidney last week.
Excerpts from the interview:
It has been seven months since The Cage was published. What was the aftermath of the book? What happened in these seven months?
Gordon Weiss was the UN spokesman for Sri Lanka in 2009: Firstpost
The book was released a month after the UN Panel report. So it provided the broader description of the whole Sri Lankan conflict on which the report sat. The UN report was a technical report. Since then, it was published in Australia, and the UK and was distributed in Sri Lanka and India. There is now a Tamil version in India. Next year it goes in for a vintage edition in the UK, a US/Canada edition and so on. The book has been picked up widely. Accordingly to a number of a people I spoke to, it is generally an accepted version of what happened in Sri Lanka. That was my intention – that this draft of history should be laid down at this point in time.
Was there a formal or informal reaction from Sri Lanka?
There was no formal reaction. There was only an informal reaction in the sense that that I have generally been damned by the establishment in Sri Lanka and its proxies in Australia. That was always anticipated, no surprise about that.
You had told me earlier that this book was written with a narrow purpose of overturning the false notion that no civilians had been harmed during the final phase of the war. The book established there were deaths of innocent people. Are you satisfied with the impact of the UN panel report, your book and the Channel Four documentary? Are you satisfied with the efforts of redress by the international community?
One thing was to overturn the notion that nobody died, or at least that the government was not responsible for anybody dying. But another thing was to imagine what the future of Sri Lanka is, and how that might be best served. The alternative, which was the government version, that there has been no deep suffering of those civilians in Sri Lanka, is not a recipe for moving forward successfully. That is my personal and professional take on it.
That a great many people died is at least the basis for taking the reconstruction and healing forward in Sri Lanka. Many oragnisations and observers inside Sri Lanka have critiqued the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) process and said that it effectively is a whitewash, even though it is well constructed and well argued. So, quite what the next step would be remains to be seen. But I am certainly satisfied with the fact that this book successfully took head-on, the erroneous notion that only a few civilians had died and that the government was not responsible for any of those deaths.
Do you think there will be some international process to take this forward? Because Sri Lanka has been resisting it all this while saying that they are competent enough to handle this.
I think that it would be foolish to lay any bet on what will happen next. I think the ground clearly exists, for any basis of fairness and equivalence with other similar international situations, for an international investigation, but I think it would be foolish for anybody to bet on whether there will be one. I say this because international affairs are inherently political, and even more so, than domestic affairs. The international judicial process is a far more unreliable creature at this point in time than any domestic legal process. I think it will be foolish for anybody to bet on precisely on what’s going to happen in the next six months, or a year, or two years.
You have referred to the record of the UN Human Rights Council on the issue. Nothing has happened in the Council largely because of China, India and the countries which Sri Lanka is friendly with. Do you think anything could have been done differently or anything can happen now?
Absolutely! And I think its very clear to people who were saying a year and half ago that nothing was going to happen without India or China saying so. It is now very clear to most people that those positions are subject to political evolutions. India has clearly moved its position. It has been explicit in some sense that there ought to be real progress from Sri Lanka in examining what happened. There is a lot of evolution around China as well. China expects to be taken to be a statesmanlike global player and a part of that statesmanship is its role and function in international hotspots. We have seen this evolution in its position in the Arab Spring. So China shows some considerable signs that those people who feel that its historical position of noninterference is monolithic and unmovable are mistaken because there is plenty of room for evolution in China. It will have a knock-on effect on Sri Lanka as well.
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