The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers

 

After working as a tradesman, then in business, and journalism, I joined the UN for two decades in peacekeeping, political, and humanitarian missions in some of the world’s toughest zones, deploying strategic communications to resolve hostage, political, and public diplomatic crises.

 

I began my international public service work with the OSCE in 1997, and then managed large teams for the UN in Bosnia and Kosovo, before I was relocated for a year to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the days immediately following 9/11.

 

As UNICEF's head of Emergency Communications based in New York, I dealt with a full range of complex development, emergency, aid and security issues, with boots-on-the-ground in theatres of conflict and natural disaster in Africa, India, former Soviet Central Asia, the Western Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. I was the head of UN communications during the final three years of Sri Lanka's civil war and, from 2015 to 2018, the head of Global Communications for UN-Habitat, based in Kenya.

 

Between UN engagements I was a visiting scholar at Sydney University’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (department of Political Science), and a research professor at Griffith University’s Asia Institute (department of Government). I was a joint founder of the International Crimes Evidence Project, a director for ActionAid Australia, and I am currently a Senior Fellow of the ARTIS International group, applying research and social science insights to a range of policy, stability, and human development issues including terrorism and radicalisation.

 

I am the son of an immigrant who became an early female judge in Australia, and a refugee whose family was extinguished during the Holocaust. As a teenager he learned English while labouring on Australia's great Snowy Mountains River Hydroelectric Scheme, before studying to be a lawyer.

 

I lived for extended periods in New York, Ashgabat, London, Prishtina, Colombo, Sydney, Barcelona, Sarajevo, Tokyo, Nairobi, Luanda, and Islamabad. I currently live between Prague and the port of Newcastle, Australia, to which the Scots part of my family immigrated in 1850. I raised two girls (and numerous other animals) with my Turkmen/Belorussian partner, a public health specialist and chef.