‘The Cage’ is no acidic account of a minority-majority struggle

Book Review of ‘The Cage’ by Gordon Weiss

by Pandukabaya de Silva

(September 03, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) When a cousin of mine living in the United Kingdom dropped off a copy of ‘’The Cage’ by Gordon Weiss, I must confess that I picked it up with a feeling of trepidation! On the one hand, I thought that this was just another book by just another UN-staffer who played the game when he was here and then took the opportunity to moralise after he had finished his assignment.

Two factors mitigated that pre-prejudicial assessment. First, the beauty of the language that Weiss uses in his telling of the agonising story of Sri Lanka’s descent into madness, grips one almost insidiously, as I turned over the pages of this book in a quiet moment overlooking the colour and serenity of the Weligama Bay. Second and more importantly, I became quickly aware that this was no acidic account of a majority-minority struggle which most writers and commentators are unfortunately apt to characterize the travails that have visited the country of my birth.

Weiss’s assessment in equating the killings of one era to the killings of another and in the careful distinction that he draws between many ordinary Buddhists of extraordinary compassion and politicians who use the cloak of a militant Buddhism for their own despicable ends, is appreciated by me, a practicing Buddhist who long ago gave up the practice of the law in Colombo due to its depravities and retreated to the courts of the provinces which are not that distinguished for their money-grabbing cultures, though here too, this is fast changing. 

So this book is a welcome departure from the norm as it looks at the country from a historic and holistic eye. It does not spare the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, commonly called the LTTE. It also does not look at only the emergence and eventual decimation of the LTTE with a compartmentalized eye or indeed, categorise (only) the government of Mahinda Rajapaksa as virtually Satanic as most are apt to do.

Instead, there is a balance to the perspectives offered. The writer looks at the crisis in Sri Lanka from the viewpoint of State excesses over a historical period and makes, for example, particular mention of the human rights excesses in the eighties against Sinhalese themselves under a different government, where Rajapaksa (described as ‘a stout and nervous lawyer’ at that time) was seen frequently in the halls of the United Nations pleading the case for his countrymen and women.

Rajapaksa’s metamorphosis from human rights crusader to despotic ruler in later years when he comes into his own as the President of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Si Lanka is perhaps inevitable but still sad. Yet Weiss’s dramatic positing of the protagonists is not between the late Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Wanni’s Sun God and the South’s King Dhutugemunu, reborn in a modern political avatar as Mahendra Percy Rajapakse. Instead, the two protagonists in his story are Prabhakaran and Gotabhaya Rajapakse, the ‘power behind the throne’ if ever such a phrase was appropriate! So we are offered the clash of two equally ruthless and unscrupulous men and the dragging down of Sri Lanka from a functional though flawed democracy to a deep, dark authoritarian abyss where the judiciary is intimidated, the public service has been beaten down, the media cowers in its own shadow and civil society is disgraced and demoralized.

Gotabhaya notwithstanding, the fulcrum of agitation remains the President whose personal charm is implied as disguising a hungry grasp for power and money. From a constitutional viewpoint, the portents are disturbing in any event, purely and simply as a matter of law. As Weiss quotes in Chapter Ten; ‘‘Unprecedented’ said prominent legal scholar Kishali Pinto-Jayawardena ‘Placing all this power in the hands of one individual has never happened before in Sri Lanka. What was de facto is now de jure.’’ It could not have been said better. What JR Jayawardene started in the touching belief that he could restrain abuse beyond a point, has now crossed the proverbial Rubicon.

Earlier, Weiss’s characterization of the four sons of the country’s foremost political family adopting a style of governance riddled with corruption that is quite different from the simple and rustic manners of their father, D.A. Rajapaksa who crossed over with SWRD Bandaranaike in a different political era, rings a chord with me, a Southerner myself. Perhaps somewhat unfair to Chamal Rajapaksa, the only brother among the lot who has still clung to his old style of living, it is still worth asking as to where is that famed thrift and stubborn pride in the integrity of the Southern politicians, aka W. Dahanayake? Time was when Southern communities used to boast that the extravagance and the corruption came from the ‘Colomba-kakkas’. Now, we cannot afford to say this anymore as the blame is literally at our doorstep. Do we hold Southern politicians to account?

The perspectives that we are offered from Weiss’s book are multifaceted, disagree as we may with some of the assessments. Regardless, any man or woman of ordinary sensibility would, no doubt, come close to tears when reading about the vividly told misery and the agony of the Wanni’s wretched during the last phrases of the war. The first-hand account of the United Nations war veteran who witnessed it all close at hand, has a ring of credibility about it that is hard to ignore.

As the waters of the Weligama Bay lapped around my feet, I could not help thinking that it was these same waters that were witness to the most horrific atrocities on the far-away beaches of the Wanni. The provocation of the LTTE in deliberately inviting attacks on the civilians by placing their artillery among groups of citizens even in the No-Fire Zone cannot be denied. Yet it was the same as it as in the eighties with the Sinhalese youth; the State’s actions were brutal and involved the indiscriminate killings of civilians, in Weligama and elsewhere. We were concerned then. Are we concerned now? Or is it that we do not care because the wretched this time around, are of a different ethnicity?

Weiss’s assessment in equating the killings of one era to the killings of another and in the careful distinction that he draws between many ordinary Buddhists of extraordinary compassion and politicians who use the cloak of a militant Buddhism for their own despicable ends, is appreciated by me, a practicing Buddhist who long ago gave up the practice of the law in Colombo due to its depravities and retreated to the courts of the provinces which are not that distinguished for their money-grabbing cultures, though here too, this is fast changing.

For those who refuse to get trapped between the crude bombastic of our politicians and the wiles of (some of) the Western nations, for those who are still striving to come to terms with the horrors of Sri Lanka’s past, recent and not-so-recent, ‘The Cage’ should be immediately – and emphatically -read.