Gordon Weiss

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The island of Sri Lanka is the same size as Tasmania and has the same population as Australia. As the dominion of Ceylon it gained full independence from Britain on Febwary 4, 1948. It retained the monarchy until 1972, when it became a republic. Hailed by its elected leaders as the Switzerland of Asia", it enjoyed a degree of self-government with universal suffrage from 1931. Women gained the vote on the same basis as men only three years after Britain.

The island's economy, based on plantation exports of tea and rubber, prospered with rising prices throughout the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. No former colonial society had a happier start. It was soon talking of itself as "the Singapore of the future".

Everything started to go wrong a few years later. The society described in these two gripping books suffered 30 years of civil war, ending with a massacre of countless civilians, according to Gordon Weiss, who is an experienced journalist. He has written an accurate and depressing picture of the final slaughter that ended the struggle for an independent state by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Tamil Tigers, just as it ended the life of Tamil leader Velupillai Prabhakaran in May 2009.

The climax of the military conflict makes for disturbing reading. Weiss concludes, after an assessment of "multiple confirmations from different army sources, senior and lower-ranking officers and enlisted men" that the Tigers' leadership group, including wives and children, was massacred in cold blood after negotiating a surrender. They were last seen alive carrying a white flag across a stretch of no-man's land on the east coast. Prabhakaran himself was killed a little later. Most likely, Weiss concludes, he was tortured and his 12-year-old son executed in front of him.

Niromi de Zoysa was a schoolgirl who left home to join the Tigers and was wise enough to defect when she realised the group's true nature. She does not narrate a long-term history of the Tamils because she was too young to witness most of it.

An excellent novel that does weave history and fiction together is Ambalavaner Sivanandan's Where Memory Dies (London, 1997). It leads us to the same conclusion as de Soyza: the Tigers had real grievances but were eventually poisoned by internal disputes and crazy leadership. Prabhakaran's determination to wipe out all Tamil rivals in the end split the group in two, and the east coast leader Colonel Karuna (Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan) defected in 2009.

Both the Tigers and the Sinhalese People's Liberation Front, or Jathika Vimukthi Peramuna, were exceptionally brutal in their treatment not only of politicians and officials, but also of the ordinary peasants who got in their way. De Zoysa emphasises this very clearly. A middle-class girl with a Christian background, de Zoysa escaped from Sri Lanka with her family and now lives in Sydney, lucky enough to be able to look back on her adventures.

It is still too early to get a reasoned debate in Sri Lanka about these dreadful events. Critical journalists and commentators continue to be kidnapped and killed. Reliable figures for the deaths and internments following the end of the war are scarce and contested by the Sri Lankan government. Weiss is a responsible critic of both sides. His account must be treated with respect.

Much of Weiss's study concentrates on the final days of the battle of the "cage" the trap in which thousands of Tamil civilians were imprisoned. The Tigers tried to defend it against the largest and best-equipped army Sri Lanka has ever had. The outcome included mass internment of civilians and claims of mass shelling of women and children in what was supposed to be a protected zone. One undoubted outcome of the civil war was the brutalisation of both sides: leaving a troubled legacy for Sri Lanka's future.

Sri Lanka had already suffered two youth risings in 1971 and 1978 by the JVP. These ended, as in the recent civil war, with the death of a charismatic leader. In the JVP revolt at least 70,000 young people and civilians were killed or interned, most of them Sinhalese. In contrast the Tamil population suffered in the civil war of the past 30 years. In this period many thousands of Tamils fled overseas, including 50,000 who came to Australia.

Sri Lanka is relatively poor, but with considerablepotential. Its people are mostly literate in Sinhala or Tamil, languages derived from different bases and with different alphabets. At least one in 10 speaks English. Much politics, public administration and business are still conducted in English.

A poor country, where about 75 per cent live in villages and country towns and depend on agriculture, has only limited means of sustaining a good life and a reasonable future for children. These include land ownership, government employment, shops and small businesses, tourism and remittances from emigrants. Otherwise life depends on daily paid labouring or a myriad of odd jobs and family support.

While Sri Lanka has enjoyed free education and a modest welfare state, this is still a life of uncertainty, with youth unemployment particularly high. Most secure salaried jobs are either in public employment or in a limited number of corporations found mainly in the capital of Colombo. Many of these superior jobs depend on knowledge of English or of the official language of Sinhala. Language is not just an indicator of ethnicity, it is an essential asset worth fighting over. In practice English-speakers are usually favoured. Sinhala speakers have access to many state jobs, while Tamil speakers have gradually been squeezed out of skilled employment (except in the northern and eastern provinces).

Latest official estimates divide the population between Sinhalese (74.5 per cent), Sri Lankan Tamils (11.9 per cent), Indian Tamils (4.6 per cent), and Sri Lankan Moors (8.3 per cent). Of these the two Tamil groups and the Muslim Moors speak Tamil and amount to 25.1 per cent of the total.

The Sinhalese have a large and permanent majority which dominates every election and government. The majority of Sinhalese are Buddhists, with a Catholic minority along the coast north of Colombo.

The majority of Tamil-speakers are more fragmented, between the northern and eastern provinces, the tea plantations, the Muslims and a substantial community settled in Colombo. Many are also Christian, although the majority are Hindus.

Sri Lankan Buddhists are overwhelmingly Sinhalese. Buddhism is seen in Western countries as a quiet and contemplative religion, renouncing wealth and power. Yet several Buddhist countries have been highly and violently politicised, including Cambodia, Burma, Vietnam and Sri Lanka. Buddhism is monastic, with considerable properties held by monasteries for the benefit of monks. This gives the higher ranks an interest in maintaining their privileges and claiming obedience from their followers and tenants.

Many buddhists believe Sri Lanka has a special duty to protect the religion, which has been locally established for more than 2000 years. Before colonisation the central Kandyan kingdom established Buddhism as its own religion and the British agreed to maintain this position. The special role of Buddhism, not only as the largest religion but also as the protector of the Sinhalese people, their culture and their island, was the agreed policy of all Sinhalese politicians except for the Marxist Left (which has withered). The most virulent of the communalists are now the SVP, once seen as Marxist followers of Che Guevara.

Weiss traces the politicisation of Buddhism to the work of the Theosophists and the local sage Anagarika Dharmapala who lived from 1864 to 1933. Son of a rich Colombo merchant and educated at the best English-language schools, he was recruited by Henry Steel Olcott, the American founder of Theosophy.

Weiss is, I think, unfair to Anagarika in blaming him as the founder of militant Sinhalese nationalism. He certainly split with the Theosophists, who believed in universal religious principles. He inspired the reorganisation of local Buddhism, which modernised its structures and attitudes and made it more effective in competition with Christianity. He is widely respected in Sri Lanka. If his views led on to the blood-letting and chaos of recent years that is hardly his fault, although he became less tolerant with age.

Sri Lankan society was fractured by a combination of caste, class, language and religion. Democratic elections were held and governments changed, though not the ruling class. This was a factor in youth disquiet among the Sinhala in 1971 and 1987 and among the Tamils from the 1980s. Even today the dominant political family is the Rajapakses, who were allies of Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike, known as S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, back in the 1950s. They occupy over a dozen of the most powerful state appointments.

Political independence from Britain came without violence. The last revolt of the Kandyan chiefs against the imperial power was in 1848. The only major communal outbreak, which Weiss details, was in 1915 and the main victims were the Muslims. Yet two aspects of politics had changed by 1960. One was a shift from liberal democracy which respects minorities and individual rights, to majority democracy, which presses for the superior rights of the dominant community.

The other was the intrusion of mass violence around language issues in 1958 and the assassination of Bandaranaike in 1959. His death had nothing to do with religion or language. It was triggered by corruption within his own party. But it set a precedent. The assassination of political leaders became increasingly common.

Weiss surveys this trend well. He notes that the increasing risks of politics led to the legitimation of large groups of bodyguards, drawn from dubious backgrounds and prone to violence.

Both the Sinhalese JVP youth insurgents and the Tamil Tigers were led by men who can be charitably described as fanatics and uncharitably as psychotic, namely Rohana Wijeweera, of the JVP, and the Tamil Prabhakaran. Not only did they unleash terrorism on civilian targets, but they organised the murder of many from their own movements or their own side of politics. Terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna lists more than 30 prominent Tamils between 1975 and 1997 who were killed by the Tigers (pioneers of suicide bombing). The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, in 1991, ended any possibility of Indian support for the Tigers or for a peaceful resolution of the struggle. It was an act of political insanity.

Three decades of civil war ended in 2009 in tragedy and controversy. A recent UN report found credible evidence of human rights abuses committed by the Sri Lankan military and the LTTE, some of which may amount to war crimes. In the light of what he calls "Sri Lanka's record of determined obfuscation" on the events of 2009, Weiss has called for a fully constituted international criminal investigation.

The immediate reaction to the massacre of the Tamil leadership, he reports in The Cage, was not encouraging. In parliament, an exuberant President Rajapaksa declared that henceforth there would be no more minorities'. There would be only two kinds of people, those who loved their country, and those who have no love for the country of their birth'. It was not a promising embrace of the diversity of Sri Lanka. Rather, as the Sunday Leader said of the celebrations that week, 'the posters, the chants. . . the pagodas, the floats, the flags, the media coverage, the symbolism of the Buddhist flag entwined with the Lion Flag ... the deification of the president, the blessings for violence and veneration of the armed forces by the Buddhist sanga clearly flag an underlying Sinhala Buddhist nationalism very much alive and pulsating with triumphalism'."

Sri Lanka now is neither Switzerland nor Singapore. It looks more like the Burma of Asia, if still better off and formally democratic. The 30-year war has left it traumatised, unhappy, militarised and fractured.

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BRIEFLY, in the spring of 2009, Sri Lanka made headlines around the world as its 26 year-old civil war came to a desperate, bloody conclusion on a remote stretch of beach in the island's north-eastern corner.

You may remember seeing apocalyptic aerial photographs that revealed scores of bodies buried beneath the sand. You may remember hearing journalists and diplomats expressing concern that, following the Sri Lankan Army's (SLA) defeat of the separatist group known as the Tamil Tigers, the country seemed to be sliding from flawed democracy to outright dictatorship with alarming speed.

Apart from occasional cricket scores, however, the chances are you won't have heard much about Sri Lanka for a couple of years now. Why? Because since the end of hostilities, the government has been doing everything in its power to keep foreign journalists out of the former conflict zone and to silence its own media, either by intimidation, imprisonment or, in the case of Lasantha Wickrematunge, the outspoken former editor of the Colombo-based Sunday Leader newspaper, assassination.

So what does the Sri Lankan government have to hide? That's the question Gordon Weiss sets out to answer in this painstakingly researched and referenced study, and his conclusions are nothing short of horrific.

As the UN's official spokesman in Colombo during the decisive period of fighting that lasted from 2006-9, Weiss was uniquely positioned to observe the human rights abuses perpetrated by both sides in the closing stages of the conflict, and also the scandalous lack of intervention by the international community. And in contrast to the SLA, which seems to specialise in indiscriminate bombardment, he lines up his targets carefully, then picks them off with surgical precision.

First, though, he gives a brief but illuminating history of the origins of Sri Lanka's civil strife - how, upon independence from Britain in 1948, an initially promising fledgling democracy started to fall apart as tensions increased between the largely Tamil, Hindu north and the predominantly Sinhalese, Buddhist south.

The key flashpoint, as identified by Weiss, was the introduction of a "Sinhala Only Act" in 1956 by newly elected prime minister SWRD Bandaranaike, who had risen to power on a wave of aggressive Sinhalese nationalism. This new piece of legislation saw Sinhala replace English as the island's official language, effectively relegating all Tamils to second-class citizens.

"Thereafter," writes Weiss, "the Act served as an enduring reference point for the rising pitch of Tamil nationalism."

This desire for a separate Tamil homeland in the north and east of the island led, ultimately, to the formation of the Tamil Tigers, a highly effective terrorist organisation headed by the ruthless Velupillai Prabhakaran, who wasn't afraid to use suicide bombers and child soldiers to achieve his goals. Having wiped out all the rival bands of freedom fighters in the north, Prabhakaran set about consolidating his power base, using the well-connected Tamil diaspora to build a global network of money laundering and gun-running operations. As a result, by the time the Norwegian government was able to broker a ceasefire in 2001, the Tigers were running a de facto state in the north and the east of the country, having resisted numerous assaults by the SLA and an ill-fated peacekeeping operation by the Indian army.

When the Tigers and the Sri Lankan government signed a "Memorandum of Understanding" in 2002, a peaceful resolution to the conflict seemed within reach. However, when the hawkish Rajapakse came to power three years later, following a period of building tension, it was only going to be a matter of time before hostilities resumed.

A lot had changed between 2002 and 2006. The Tigers had grown physically weaker after their Eastern commander, Colonel Karuna, turned against them in a spat over the allocation of funds, taking 5,000 fighters with him. But they were politically weaker too. In the 1990s, with liberal interventionism apparently proving its worth in the Balkans, self-determination for oppressed ethnic minorities was very much in vogue. In the wake of 9/11, however, terrorist organisations - even ones that claimed to be fighting to establish a homeland for their people - found themselves with serious PR problems. Furthermore, with the US bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, Sri Lanka increasingly fell within China's sphere of influence, and it used this new state of affairs to full advantage. Indeed, the main reason the international community failed to act via the UN, Weiss argues, was because the Chinese made it clear they would block any moves to consider the legality or otherwise of the Sri Lankan government's actions.

The Rajapakse regime has been accused of genocide by some observers because of the way it conducted the final phase of the war. Weiss doesn't go quite that far, but it is clear from his analysis that, as the Tigers retreated eastwards, taking more than 300,000 Tamil civilians with them, the SLA repeatedly used heavy artillery on areas they knew were packed with refugees.

We know this, in part, because of the bravery of Harun Khan, a retired colonel from the Bangladeshi army who, in January 2009, was leading a UN convoy that became trapped in the ever-shrinking area of Tiger-controlled land that came to be known as "The Cage".

Eventually, Harun was able to reach a supposed "No Fire Zone" established by the SLA where he set up camp. However, he soon found himself under heavy bombardment, along with thousands of refugees who had flocked to the area on the advice of the government. Having established that the shells were coming from government lines, Harun radioed his coordinates to UN HQ in Colombo, who relayed them to the SLA's battlefield commander, but the bombardment continued. Harun characterised it as "not directed fire, but the kind of indiscriminate covering barrage that is used to shield an advance. But it was non-stop, and it was striking a field full of people who had just eaten their dinners and gone to sleep." His verdict: "the intentional massacre of civilians."

The resulting carnage, photographed by Harun, was indescribable, but worse was to come. As the SLA advanced, the Tigers continued to retreat eastwards, until, by mid-April, they were defending a narrow sand spit separated from the mainland by the Nandikadal lagoon. When the army's final offensive began, the sand spit had become a huge refugee camp, much of it in close proximity to the Tigers' front line, but that didn't stop the SLA from using "massive artillery fire and air sorties" before launching a bloody all-out assault. It's impossible to say how many civilians were killed in the first five months of 2009, but by the time Prahakharan's body was recovered and victory had been declared, Weiss estimates that somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 had lost their lives. A recent Channel 4 report put the number at around 30,000.

At no point does Weiss attempt to glamorise the Tigers, or excuse their actions - he is highly critical of the way they used the Tamil population as a human shield and of the way they violently recruited child soldiers from among their number. But he reserves his strongest condemnation for the SLA - a sophisticated fighting force that had the means to avoid high civilian casualties but chose not to - and for the international community, which collectively shrugged its shoulders at the resulting slaughter.

In his concluding remarks, Weiss wonders: "Given the sudden irruption of China into the neat, progressive assumptions of [the] liberal internationalist order, is it more prudent to ignore allegations of war crimes? A 2010 US Senate committee report explicitly noted that the US risks "losing" Sri Lanka to the Chinese team. Given the advent of Great Powers jostling in the Indian Ocean, does the pragmatic US interest in retaining Sri Lanka in its orbit trump the demands of justice?"

Following this month's screening at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva of an hour-long Channel 4 documentary featuring fresh evidence of war crimes in Sri Lanka, pressure for an independent investigation is mounting.

As long as Mr Rajapakse has China in his corner, though, it's hard to see him facing a Mladic moment in the Hague.

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ALL insurgencies end in negotiations, argue those in favour of talking with the Taliban to end the conflict in Afghanistan.

After a decade of war and no sign of a military solution, only a political settlement with moderate Taliban can achieve long-sought stability and pave the way for a withdrawal of Western troops.

But what happens when there is no middle ground, no moderates to appeal to and a bitter ethnic divide driven by nationalistic chauvinism on the one hand and an ingrained persecution complex on the other?

Sri Lanka endured 26 years of civil war and 70,000 deaths before the army achieved what many thought impossible: it crushed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, one of the 20th century's most tenacious and violent insurgent groups.

In May 2009, Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and most of his top lieutenants were killed in a final bloody battle in the northeast of Sri Lanka. So proud was the government of its achievement that it held an international conference in Colombo earlier this month to showcase its military-led model for defeating insurgencies.

But there is a downside to using force as a first and last resort, even when the enemy as violent and fanatical as the Tamil Tigers.

In April, the UN released a damning report that outlined suspected war crimes committed against civilians by both sides in the conflict. About 40,000 people were killed in the final months of the war as the Tigers herded thousands of civilians on to a narrow strip of land bounded by the ocean on one side and a lagoon on the other where the guerilla group made its suicidal last stand. The Cage, as it became known, resembled a vast internment camp for 330,000 desperate civilians who endured a five-month-long siege.

The UN report charged the Sri Lanka government with repeatedly shelling safe zones set up to protect civilians, including hospitals and food distribution lines. The Tamil Tigers were accused of holding civilians as human shields, recruiting child soldiers and firing on those who tried to flee.

Gordon Weiss's The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers documents in chilling detail the lead-up to this tragedy and its brutal aftermath. As the spokesman and communications adviser to the UN mission during the final years of the conflict, Weiss, who is Australian, witnessed an unfolding drama that would have far-reaching implications for the region.

The present debate over asylum-seeker policy was largely provoked by the sudden rise in Tamil boatpeople arriving in Australia in 2009 and 2010 to flee the conflict and its aftermath. If anyone has any doubts about the push factors driving that spike in arrivals, this book is essential reading.

But Weiss's study of the Tamil conflict is also an accessible and compelling narrative of Sri Lanka's often violent and tortured history. Ceylon, as it was known at the time, achieved independence in 1948 without the bloodshed experienced by India and Pakistan. The first Sinhalese majority government under D.S. Senanayake was an enlightened administration that incorporated the island's minority groups, the Tamils, Burghers and Muslims.

But this golden era was short-lived. Sinhalese nationalism that had been simmering below the surface manifested itself politically with the passing of the Sinhala Only Act in 1955. The act sparked riots that left several hundred Tamils dead and was an ominous taste of a much bloodier and drawn-out conflict.

A new constitution introduced in 1972 further restricted the rights of Tamils, who began agitating for an autonomous homeland in the north and east of the country through the Tamil United Liberation Front. Tamil youths, disillusioned with the failure of peaceful resistance, began to take up arms.

In July 1983, after the government displayed the bodies of 13 soldiers killed by a landmine, troops in Colombo went on the rampage targeting Tamil homes and businesses. Up to 3000 Tamils were killed and thousands more sought refuge in government-controlled camps or fled abroad.

Aided by elements of this new diaspora, the Tamil Tigers grew to become one of the world's most feared and effective guerilla groups.

It was the Tigers who perfected the technique of suicide bombing as a means of terrorising a population for political ends, counting among their victims India's prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, who had sent an expeditionary force to Sri Lanka in a failed bid to crush them.

At the height of their insurrection, the Tigers had their own navy, a rudimentary airforce using specially converted Cessnas and small, highly effective suicidal penetration teams.

Weiss pulls no punches in tackling the atrocities committed by the Tigers. But he is equally scathing about the failure of the successive Sri Lankan administrations to deal with the aspirations of the Tamil minority and brutal tactics employed by the Sri Lankan Army to quash the rebellion.

He also details the desperate attempts by a UN convoy in the final weeks of the war to assist those civilians trapped in the Cage. Despite the government's insistence that it was pursuing a policy of "zero civilian casualties" by honouring the no-fire-zone status of the enclave, Weiss presents sufficient evidence to quantify the charge that war crimes were committed by the Sri Lankan Army.

But the UN does not emerge unscathed. When the UN Human Rights Council was issuing numerous resolutions condemning Israel's invasion of Gaza, it could barely muster one on Sri Lanka despite credible allegations of war crimes.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon failed to use the UN's moral authority to denounce the tabulated killing of civilians, in the interests of keeping open channels of communication with the Sri Lankan government, and also of humanitarian access.

This proved to be a tragic mistake. As Weiss points out, the UN's excuse that casualty reports could not be verified, unwittingly supported the deceptive "zero civilian casualties" narrative the Sri Lankan government maintained.

Could the civil war have been averted? If the grievances of Tamils had been addressed in the years after independence through constitutional safeguards as well as social and economic development, Weiss believes it could have. Even after the war started opportunities for a negotiated settlement were constantly stymied by inflexibility of the Sri Lankan state on the one hand and the violence and nihilism of Prabhakaran on the other.

The defeat of the Tigers, however, does not necessarily mean peace will prevail. Weiss's depressing conclusion, backed by ample evidence, is that Tamil grievances are being addressed with government-backed tyranny as the state extends a hegemonic hold over all aspects of civil society.

Weiss's book will not be popular with the government in Colombo, but there is nothing in it that will give succour to the Tamil cause as espoused by the Tigers.

Its value lies in its dispassionate analysis of the cause of Sri Lanka's tragic civil war and how such conflicts can be avoided.

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In March 2010, almost twelve months after the hostilities in northern Sri Lanka that had caught the world's attention had finished, I drove up the road from the town of Vavuniya to Kilinochchi, the former headquarters of the Tamil Tigers. Velupillai Prabhakaran, the violent and dictatorial leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), was dead; he had been shot in the last days of the civil war waged for nearly three decades between the Tamil separatists and the Sri Lankan government, which he bore at least some of the blame for perpetuating. The LTTE had been dispersed and, though an army officer told me that some of their fighters still remained at liberty, most had been killed or interned. The conflict was clearly over.

It had taken some time to get permission for the drive - my dispatch from Kilinochchi for The Guardian ended up being the first published from the town - and the actual journey from Vavuniya was almost disappointingly straightforward. The road had been resurfaced and was in excellent condition, a rare occurrence anywhere in South Asia, and there was almost no other traffic. The government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, the populist politician from the south of the island whose power was buttressed by support among rural communities from the Sinhalese majority, had publicly said he was banking on economic development to heal the wounds of war. Except for a large billboard advertising a bank, there was little sign of any obvious wealth generation in the bleak, scrubby, depopulated plains of the Vanni as I drove across them. The military presence was, in contrast, very evident, with small fortified posts, many on stilts, among the half-cleared minefields either side of the road.

Those wounds of war, as Gordon Weiss makes clear in this comprehensive, fair and well-written work, were widened and deepened in the last days of Sri Lanka's long conflict. The book's title is a reference to the trap that formed around hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians who had followed the LTTE's retreat from advancing government forces. Mixed up with LTTE fighters (though less so than the army would claim), men and women, old and young, were subject to a 'siege of epic proportions as the insurgents fell back on a small pocket of land on the island's north east coast to make a final stand'. This was the cage. The LTTE pressed 'cohorts of untested boys and girls, some barely into their teens, into the lines of battle'. The army shelled with little if any attempt to avoid civilians. Under the late spring sun, with shortages of food, water and medicine, casualties mounted fast. A United Nations expert panel concluded that up to 40,000 may have died.

Weiss, a veteran journalist and long-serving UN official, had the misfortune to be the spokesmen for the organisation in Colombo as the casualties mounted. His instincts as a reporter and a humanitarian clashed with the diplomatic complexities of his job. This book is in part born of that tension. It is, one feels, a result of a great feeling of having let down those who died.

In fact it was not Weiss who betrayed anybody but the organisation he worked for. Those who died on the beaches of Mullaitivu were effectively sacrificed for what is seen by common consensus as the greater good, in other words the deep and frequent compromises by which some degree of global cohabitation is maintained. The reason Weiss could not, as the UN spokesman, have taken a more aggressive stand against the appalling events occurring only a day's drive in a big white Landcruiser from where he and his fellow international diplomats sat in their air-conditioned offices, was that China, Russia and a range of other powers lined up to protect Sri Lanka from the strident and almost exclusively Western concern at what was happening. The same states have more recently blocked calls for a genuine UN inquiry.

In response to the criticism, Rajapaksa - or rather the Rajapaksas, since the military operation was largely run by the president's defence secretary and brother, Gotabhaya - was to argue that, first, the LTTE were terrorists and that this was how terrorists should be dealt with and had been dealt with by other states over the previous decade; and that, secondly, no country had the right to intervene in another's affairs. In both, the influence of the actions of the Bush administration could be seen. Weiss - who has an eye for an apposite quote - cites General Sarath Fonseka, military commander of the Sri Lankan forces, arguing in April 2009 that no foreign force would obstruct the army from 'marching forward to liberate the innocent civilians' in what would be 'the world's largest hostage rescue operation'.

There is currently serious discussion among analysts of the 'Sri Lankan model' of counterinsurgency. This is seen as a repudiation of all the fashionable liberal 'hearts and minds' thinking of recent years and a return to the good old-fashioned 'kill enough of them to make them stop' strategy. The LTTE famously helped popularise suicide bombing and, until the quantum leap in terrorism on 9/11, were seen as the most effective organisation using the tactic. Between 1987 and May 2009, the LTTE despatched 273 attackers, of whom forty-seven were women, on 137 missions. One sure consequence of the end of the war is that these have now stopped.

However, one of the strengths of this book is that, unlike much of the reporting at the time of the crisis in 2009, it unpicks the roots of the problem that led to the emergence of the effective, aggressive, innovatory and very ugly organisation that was the LTTE. This goes much further than a simple account of tensions between Tamils and Sinhala or Hindus and Buddhists, delving deep into Sri Lanka's tradition of maximalist politics and the role of the violence in Sri Lanka during the 1970s and 1980s in forming the worldview of its current leaders. One minor criticism of The Cage is that Weiss could have stressed further how Rajapaksa, for all his evils, remains an extremely popular politician. Yes, he is a demagogue. Yes, he has a history of repressing the press. Yes, his rejection of any blame and clear lack of interest in any genuine reconciliation after the war are shocking. But he has won a military victory that the majority of voters are deeply grateful for and this, along with careful efforts to develop rural areas where his core supporters live, assures his power as much as anything. His various political victories are not the result of electoral fraud. The end of the war in Sri Lanka has sparked an economic boom that is forecast to double the wealth of Sri Lankans - if not of northern or plantation Tamils - within a few years and possibly triple it within a decade as foreign investment and tourists flow in. If that is so, his continued rule seems assured. The lesson of the historical chapters, indeed of this book as a whole, is clear: violence brings more violence. The lesson of the next chapter of Sri Lanka's history may well be that violence can also bring wealth and continued power.

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One of the best books published by an Australian this year has nothing to do with the Sydney Writers' Festival. It is The Cage by Gordon Weiss, about Sri Lanka's civil war. Sri Lanka! Who cares, some knockers may ask? But the book is written in blood. Weiss had worked abroad for 15 years, including several years as UN spokesman in Sri Lanka, before returning to Australia to
write The Cage. He does not apportion blame for the Sri Lankan horrors. He details the atrocities of both the corrupt and savage Sinhalese government and the totalitarian Tamil Tigers. He notes the geopolitics of the story, as China turns Sri Lanka into a client state. But the book is also a personal statement, a sort of parable of the World, the Flesh and the Devil. Himself the grandson of a man who was murdered in Auschwitz, Weiss is aware of the thin line that separates civilized societies from those that sink into collective madness governed by hatred. His is a bleak vision. There are no formulaic solutions – only eternal vigilance. John Dowd, the former Attorney - General and Supreme Court judge, launched The Cage in the tiny, side-street Hollywood Hotel, one of the few remaining pubs in the city. It was a moving event.

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The ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka was always a silent war, with much of the killing and suffering hidden from view. This was never more so than at its horrific climax in the first five months of 2009, when the Sri Lankan army trapped the last Tamil Tiger guerrillas as they hid among more than 300,000 Tamil refugees in an area twice the size of Hampstead Heath and unleashed on them a vicious bloodbath.

At the time, nobody knew the full extent of the carnage. The government had banished international journalists and aid workers and forced the UN from the scene, so that there were no witnesses while the army methodically bombarded the coastal spit of land with artillery, all the time maintaining the fiction that it was respecting a "no-fire zone".

Gordon Weiss, however, was working in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, as the UN spokesman. A journalist and UN official for two decades, much of it spent in conflict zones, he has published the first comprehensive factual account of the mass killing and why the UN was powerless to prevent it.

His book is a striking account of the ruthless terror wreaked by both sides on the innocent civilians trapped in the pocket of land. The Tamil Tigers, hoping that the presence of the refugees would shield them from attack, killed those they found trying to escape to government lines. As the perimeter shrank, the Tigers grew more desperate. "They would shoot, execute and beat to death many hundreds of people, ensure the deaths of thousands of teenagers by press-ganging them into the front lines and kill those children and their parents who resisted," Weiss writes.

But whatever the sins perpetrated by the Tigers, Weiss says that it was the Sri Lankan army that inflicted the bulk of deaths on the captive ­population. Seizing the chance to defeat the Tigers, against whom it had fought for nearly 30 years, the army shelled the area with heavy artillery without a shred of restraint. As many as 40,000 civilians are believed to have died in the blitz, as well as the entire Tigers leadership, including Velupillai Prabakharan, the group's fanatical creator and supreme leader.

Although not himself an eyewitness to the slaughter, Weiss was close enough to the levers of power for us to trust his judgment that the killings were war crimes that should be investigated. His book is a powerful indictment of the leadership of President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother Gotabaya, the defence secretary, who drove the campaign.

There is no doubt that the world is a safer place without the Tamil Tigers, a ruthless insurgent group that grew out of the ethnic war waged on the mostly Hindu Tamils by the xenophobic government. The Tigers were not bound by any of the rules of warfare. They pioneered suicide bombing long before Al-Qaeda. They blew up buildings, put bombs on planes, trains and buses, used children as fighters, developed their own navy (including submarines) and even had an air force of light planes.

Among the leaders they have killed are the Sri Lankan president and the former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. They would not tolerate any dissent in their community and exterminated moderate Tamil leaders. Much of the overseas money for their arms and guerrilla operations was raised by extortion and through the heroin trade.

Weiss emphatically supports Sri Lanka's right to protect its territory from such a scourge. But he believes that the army's mass killing of civilians in order to destroy the Tigers was a step too far and cannot go unmarked. Not only is it one of the darkest, most shameful episodes of the new millennium — but how is it that the United Nations was so slow to react and did not do more to stop the slaughter?

One reason for the failure is that the Sri Lankan government was extremely adept at hiding what was going on and successfully projected its struggle against the Tigers as its part of the "global war on terror". Another was that China protected it in the UN Security Council, blocking international action.

Weiss's book is well-timed. UN experts, too, have just released a damning report that says the killing of tens of thousands of civilians in the 2009 offensive may amount to war crimes. The Sri Lankan government angrily rejects it. But this is a "Srebrenica moment", which must be seized, Weiss says. Failure to have a credible judicial war-crimes investigation will be an encouragement to other brutal regimes with "terrorist" problems to follow Sri Lanka's model of waging a silent war against its own people away from the world's gaze.

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It marked the government's defnitive victory in a bloody 26-year civil war—one, moreover, that analysts, including this newspaper, had for years argued could never be won. Yet in the end victory was so complete that peace already seems permanent.

A book, published this week, by Gordon Weiss, the United Nations' spokesman in Colombo in the fnal stages of the war, ("The Cage"*) is an excellent account of how that victory was won, and of the price paid for the present peace by Sri Lankans from the Sinhalese majority as well as the Tamil and Muslim minorities.

Despite all the horrors around the world since then, many will recall the sense of outraged helplessness felt internationally in the fnal months of the war. Their beleaguered forces, having in effect taken hundreds of thousands of civilians hostage in a dwindling patch of northern Sri Lanka ("the cage"), were pounded relentlessly. So were the civilians.

The book's outline of Sri Lankan history suggests that this brutality was not an aberration for the country. Not only had the war with the Tigers always been savage. So had been the violence of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or JVP, a group espousing a strange hybrid ideology of Marxism and Sinhalese chauvinism, which staged two bloody uprisings in 1971 and from 1987-1989, both suppressed with enormous loss of life.

The real value of "The Cage", however, is its detailed account of the war's denouement. It supplements and adds context to the fndings of a report published in April by a panel of experts for the United Nations. Mr Weiss has done an excellent job of piecing together as accurate a picture as possible of what went on in the cage, which, at the time, the government sealed off almost entirely from outside observers.

In the process, he recounts, as do the UN's experts, compelling evidence of inexcusable disregard for human life on both sides of the confict. If some of the massacres and murders described do not constitute war crimes, it is hard to know what would.

Three factors helped the government get away with its ruthless approach. One was the sheer awfulness of the Tigers—as vicious and totalitarian a bunch of thugs as ever adopted terrorism as a national-liberation strategy. Whatever the government did, it could never be worse.

It seems to have come close however, helped by the second factor: tight information management and censorship, including the intimidation of the local press, and a willingness to tell bald lies to foreign leaders. Third, unlike, say, Libya, it had the backing of both India and a veto-wielding member of the United Nations Security Council, China. It is not an encouraging precedent for a new multipolar world order.

Sri Lanka's government insists its forces pursued a policy of "zero civilian casualties". It is now going on the propaganda offensive, organising an international counter-terrorism conference in Colombo at the end of this month, to advertise the success of its methods.

The government will doubtless rubbish this book, and point to it, like the experts' report, as evidence of the UN's prejudices against it. In fact the book, which also tells stories of individual Sri Lankan soldiers' heroic efforts to save civilian lives, is scrupulously fair.

But it will make little difference to Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka's president, and his family, who, in the words of a Sri Lankan analyst quoted in the book, are "transforming Sri Lanka from a fawed democracy to a dynastic oligarchy".

That description is true enough. But a troubling aspect which the book rather skates over is that the Rajapaksa clan seems, among the Sinhalese majority, to enjoy genuine popular support. And foreign criticism, such as the UN experts' report and this book, only enhances its popularity.

That makes it still seem unlikely that there will be any true accountability for atrocities committed in Sri Lanka's war. In that sense the book reads as a lament, not just for those slaughtered, but for what the author calls a "co-operative view of international relations", which maintains that "the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians do count, and that the way you fght a war does matter, even when your cause is just."

*The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka & the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers. By Gordon Weiss. Bodley Head; 384 pages; £14.99