The UN’s plan for making white people feel better

By Kath Noble

Last week I felt like I had been transported back in time. We were back in those awful first six months of 2009, when I was by turns horrified at the plight of the people caught up in the fighting in the Vanni and disgusted with the way in which the international community was responding.

Of course, we all wanted to stop the war. I hate violence. But as I argued then and continue to believe, at that point, the only way the war was going to stop was with the defeat of the LTTE. Prabhakaran would not give up on Eelam. He was going to continue his vicious campaign against the Sri Lankan state and all its communities until he was caught or killed. Our task, therefore, was to minimise the damage. We had to try to ensure that it was done with as little death and destruction as possible.


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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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