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 Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (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. I was in the first UN team to reach ground zero in Aceh after the 2004 Tsunami, and was boots-on-the-ground in theatres of conflict and natural disaster in Africa, India, former Soviet Central Asia, the Western Balkans, the Caribbean, 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.