Gordon Weiss
Auteur de The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers
A propos de l'auteur
Gordon Weiss has lived in New York and worked in numerous conflict and natural disaster zones including Bosnia, Afghanistan, Darfur, and Haiti: Employed by the United Nations for over twelve years, he is now a visiting scholar at Sydney University and a correspondent for Australia's The Global afficher plus Mail, where he continues his investigative reporting on Sri Lanka. afficher moins
Crédit image: Gordon Weiss, author of The Cage
Œuvres de Gordon Weiss
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- Australia (birth)
- Lieu de naissance
- Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Courte biographie
- Gordon Weiss is a writer, speaker and documentary maker on international affairs. He worked for the United Nations for twelve years. His perspective was forged over two decades as a journalist, aid worker, and international civil servant in numerous notorious hotspots such as Afghanistan, Angola, Bosnia, Guatemala, Haiti, Indonesia, Israel, Kosovo, Nepal, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Sudan.
After studying law, history, politics, military strategy, anthropology, philosophy and literature he acquired an MA in International Relations with a focus on security. Born in Sydney to a Czech father and a New Zealand mother, he has lived in Barcelona, New York, Prague, Sarajevo, and Tokyo. He currently divides his time between Australia and various extended overseas projects. The Cage is his first published book.
Membres
Critiques
Cette critique a été écrite dans le cadre des Critiques en avant-première de LibraryThing.At heart, I don't think Gordon Weiss is a long form writer. He was formerly a UN official, and the prose and structure of The Cage seems to show someone who more naturally writes briefing papers than full-length books. Although The Cage is a short 230 pages, at times I felt it could have been edited down further still (and benefited from another editorial pass because of some occasionally clunky phrasing). These quibbles aside, I think this is well worth the read: Weiss details the last stages of the civil war in Sri Lanka, a conflict which was largely ignored or dismissed by the international community. It's a pretty damning indictment of all sides involved, and a lament for the fact that those responsible for so much pain and suffering will probably never be held accountable. Not an easy read but a worthwhile one.… (plus d'informations)
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siriaeve | 13 autres critiques | Jan 17, 2013 |
siriaeve | 13 autres critiques | Jan 17, 2013 | Cette critique a été écrite dans le cadre des Critiques en avant-première de LibraryThing.This was a superb investigative book about the Sri Lankan Civil War, from its origins in the postcolonial years, to the disastrous end of the war, in which tens of thousands of innocent civilians were killed by the Sri Lankan Army in its push to eradicate the last traces of the Tamil Tigers. Weiss's attention to detail and his use of on the spot observers, including civilians and NGO workers, is a damning condemnation of the current President and his brother, the Defense Minister.
Cette critique a été écrite dans le cadre des Critiques en avant-première de LibraryThing.I came to this book with a set of vague impressions--that the Tamil Tigers were a vicious crew of killers but nevertheless not comparable to al-Qaeda and that ilk--rebels, not terrorists; that my love for MIA, b. Maya Arulpragasam, father a cadre of EROS, the Eelam Revolutionary Organsation of Students, might be romanticizing or exoticiing (= romoticizing) my judgment a little; that I was pretty sure some baaaad shit went down on that emerald isle in the spring of 2009, and maybe the Tigers were responsible but they sure didn't come out of it looking like winners. Gordon Weiss, who spent years in Sri Lanka as a journalist and then as UN spokesguy, used all his briefing-writing powers to give me what I wanted--a brief (230-page), well-supported (the whole book, including preface, maps, pictures, glossary, list of acronyms, timeline, dramatis personae, notes, bibliography, and index, is more like 360 pages) account of the almost casual way in which things so often fall apart when they're gonna fall all the way; the "paranoia of a society deranged by war psychosis"; and the final atrocity that played out on the sand spit that became known as "the Cage."
I learned a lot of stuff about how the aforesaid paranoia is indistinguishable from megalomania, with Sri Lankan government officials routinely issuing absurd pronouncements treating the UN and the Red Cross as little more than Tiget fronts; about how capriciously the ethnic genie was let out of the bottle, with racial laws passed eagerly by multiple governments for short-lived political advantage or the ability to prosecute a war "more effectively" that instead grew with every new unjust decree; the power of the terrorist bugbear to prevent Western governments in that apocalyptic decade just past from seeing with their eyes what was going on; the absolutely fucked-up nature of the things that happened to Lankan society, with kangaroo courts beginning by reading out the addresses of the families of all the witnesses, laws saying anyone who had any interaction with any Tiger, even unknowingly, could be imprisoned indefinitely, and a law enforcement establishment that treated any Tamil as a Tiger; one domination-minded family that now controls 70% of the country's finances (!) and has legislated itself into power basically until the system crumbles, using the rebels as a pretext. Weiss has an exceptional ability to express things pithily not only from the perspectives of the prime actors, stepping out of the Western lens and helping his audience see their leaders and their practices as Otherly--"the country's readiness to play the rogue nation card and to court support from Iran, among others, provoked timidity from a group of influential nations traditionally far more assertive regarding morality in foreign policy"--but also from that of the suffering people, many of whose individual stories are here, and heart breaking.
Most importantly, I learned that Mahinda and Gotabaya Rajapaksa, aided by thousands of Sinhalese with varying degrees of culpability, bottled their enemies up in a little package of land smaller than Vancouver's Stanley Park along with 330,000 civilians and then bombed and blasted them indiscriminately until tens of thousands were dead, more willing to kill Tamils seemingly indefinitely than let the adversaries escape again.
Some people will read that and words like "bleeding heart" will arise in their rage brains and they will say things like war is war and they were terrists and it worked dinnit but this is a good litmus baseline for that kind of talk, because Weiss only implicitly says this is an elected government and it should be better than a terrorist organization--in fact, he elaborately acknowledges the Sri Lankan govenrment's right to defend its territory even at the cost of some undefined degree of oppression of its own people. What he does say is even if we can't expect them to be better, we shouldn't expect them to be ten times worse. The Tigers were holding people hostage and killing them to the tune of thousands with their li'l guns, so the government took a leaf from somekind of ultraviolent comicplaybook and said U TTHINK WE GIVE A FUCK and killed the hostages themselves, ten times faster, just so Prabhakaran and his cronies would shit themselves. So evil!
And that's not even taking into account the fact that they had already won, that it was more and more a mopping up operation, only the mop was second-hand Chinese artillery. This isn't Israel--it's Israel with even more of the moral ambiguity removed; it's Somalia but not in the facilitating context of the total breakdown of civil society, Syria but with everybody in Colombo still going about their lives and graduating from law school. This is an important book because we don't know what happened there, we have a vague sad concern, but we are easily distracted. This is testimony, and it doesn't make us any better but it still means something that we hear it.
From a military or a, like, insurgency perspective, too, this is a primer on the risks of trying to operate as a traditional army, let alone a traditional country. The Tigers were the best there was at what they did and for thirty years they were unbeatable--melting into shadows, 'ssassinatin' political leaders, maintaining a whole clandestine and legit economy across the globe, and a merchant marine, and an air force! And they were so good that ten years ago they had basically won--Eelam was baasically a country, and they were even providing basic services! Magnificent. But then you go from being able to melt into shadows to having to go to your office and, like, read a budget proposal, not to mention provide peace for a ppulation that has suffered long, and that's when the much larger nation to the south totally dedicated to your destruction gets the chance to strike with its traditional army, and you're on their turf now, and it DOES NOT go well. It's like, the Tamil Tigers were Gozer and they had to draw him into a physical host to destroy him. But like, not evil Gozer. Well, yes, evil Gozer, but the Ghostbusters in this case are even worse. Look, this was a tragedy and the perpetrators got away Sinhal free and not all my offensive metaphorizing will change that.… (plus d'informations)
I learned a lot of stuff about how the aforesaid paranoia is indistinguishable from megalomania, with Sri Lankan government officials routinely issuing absurd pronouncements treating the UN and the Red Cross as little more than Tiget fronts; about how capriciously the ethnic genie was let out of the bottle, with racial laws passed eagerly by multiple governments for short-lived political advantage or the ability to prosecute a war "more effectively" that instead grew with every new unjust decree; the power of the terrorist bugbear to prevent Western governments in that apocalyptic decade just past from seeing with their eyes what was going on; the absolutely fucked-up nature of the things that happened to Lankan society, with kangaroo courts beginning by reading out the addresses of the families of all the witnesses, laws saying anyone who had any interaction with any Tiger, even unknowingly, could be imprisoned indefinitely, and a law enforcement establishment that treated any Tamil as a Tiger; one domination-minded family that now controls 70% of the country's finances (!) and has legislated itself into power basically until the system crumbles, using the rebels as a pretext. Weiss has an exceptional ability to express things pithily not only from the perspectives of the prime actors, stepping out of the Western lens and helping his audience see their leaders and their practices as Otherly--"the country's readiness to play the rogue nation card and to court support from Iran, among others, provoked timidity from a group of influential nations traditionally far more assertive regarding morality in foreign policy"--but also from that of the suffering people, many of whose individual stories are here, and heart breaking.
Most importantly, I learned that Mahinda and Gotabaya Rajapaksa, aided by thousands of Sinhalese with varying degrees of culpability, bottled their enemies up in a little package of land smaller than Vancouver's Stanley Park along with 330,000 civilians and then bombed and blasted them indiscriminately until tens of thousands were dead, more willing to kill Tamils seemingly indefinitely than let the adversaries escape again.
Some people will read that and words like "bleeding heart" will arise in their rage brains and they will say things like war is war and they were terrists and it worked dinnit but this is a good litmus baseline for that kind of talk, because Weiss only implicitly says this is an elected government and it should be better than a terrorist organization--in fact, he elaborately acknowledges the Sri Lankan govenrment's right to defend its territory even at the cost of some undefined degree of oppression of its own people. What he does say is even if we can't expect them to be better, we shouldn't expect them to be ten times worse. The Tigers were holding people hostage and killing them to the tune of thousands with their li'l guns, so the government took a leaf from somekind of ultraviolent comicplaybook and said U TTHINK WE GIVE A FUCK and killed the hostages themselves, ten times faster, just so Prabhakaran and his cronies would shit themselves. So evil!
And that's not even taking into account the fact that they had already won, that it was more and more a mopping up operation, only the mop was second-hand Chinese artillery. This isn't Israel--it's Israel with even more of the moral ambiguity removed; it's Somalia but not in the facilitating context of the total breakdown of civil society, Syria but with everybody in Colombo still going about their lives and graduating from law school. This is an important book because we don't know what happened there, we have a vague sad concern, but we are easily distracted. This is testimony, and it doesn't make us any better but it still means something that we hear it.
From a military or a, like, insurgency perspective, too, this is a primer on the risks of trying to operate as a traditional army, let alone a traditional country. The Tigers were the best there was at what they did and for thirty years they were unbeatable--melting into shadows, 'ssassinatin' political leaders, maintaining a whole clandestine and legit economy across the globe, and a merchant marine, and an air force! And they were so good that ten years ago they had basically won--Eelam was baasically a country, and they were even providing basic services! Magnificent. But then you go from being able to melt into shadows to having to go to your office and, like, read a budget proposal, not to mention provide peace for a ppulation that has suffered long, and that's when the much larger nation to the south totally dedicated to your destruction gets the chance to strike with its traditional army, and you're on their turf now, and it DOES NOT go well. It's like, the Tamil Tigers were Gozer and they had to draw him into a physical host to destroy him. But like, not evil Gozer. Well, yes, evil Gozer, but the Ghostbusters in this case are even worse. Look, this was a tragedy and the perpetrators got away Sinhal free and not all my offensive metaphorizing will change that.… (plus d'informations)
1 MeditationesMartini | 13 autres critiques | Dec 14, 2012 |
MeditationesMartini | 13 autres critiques | Dec 14, 2012 | Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 1
- Membres
- 75
- Popularité
- #235,804
- Évaluation
- 3.7
- Critiques
- 14
- ISBN
- 6
The book includes a nice little chapter on the island's history from the first written items available to 2010. Then it goes on to describe the first months of the last year of the war, and does so in a way that I consider both engaging and informative.
And about midway through the book the author lets go of the chronological order, that so far he had respected, and starts to explore the corruption at the political, journalistic and judiciary levels. And he provides plenty of examples in each case, the problem being that he doesn't refrain from repeating the basic facts, common to each story, again and again.
Besides the first half of the book there's one other thing that I thoroughly enjoyed about this book and is the abundance of notes, specially those that display the articles of the Geneva and Hague conventions that are relevant to each case of alleged war crimes.… (plus d'informations)