An Unreliable Witness

GORDON WEISS, THE CAGE AND SRI LANKA

Gordon Weiss was a spokesman for the United Nations organisation in Sri Lanka for two years at the

end of that country’s civil war. His 2011 book, The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of

the Tamil Tigers, is said to be a close study of the last months and weeks of the conflict in the Vanni.1

The Cage is a controversial, anti-government view of the end of the war. His book is well-written, as

might be expected of an articulate, middle-class and well-educated international bureaucrat. The

problem is that it is a deeply-flawed account of a crisis that in several key respects was impossible to

document – most notably with regard to civilian casualties. The events said to have been described in

The Cage were infinitely complicated. Leaving aside mistakes in historical detail and other simple fact

2, it is Weiss’s inability to answer key questions he begrudgingly or accidentally poses; selectivity with

information and a particularly self-serving slant on the events in the Vanni from late 2008 up until May

2009 that are of concern to anyone expecting an accurate account of the crisis.

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