Robert Blake hides U.S. maneuver to save Prabhakaran

Several Sri Lankan newspapers have carried former U.S. Department of State diplomat Robert Blake’s malicious canard that Washington’s sole interest was to save the unarmed Tamil civilians during the final weeks of the military battle between the Sri Lanka forces and the Tamil Tigers, and gave wide coverage to his pronouncement that Washington never attempted to rescue the Tiger leader Prabhakaran and his top leadership bringing pressure on the Government of Sri Lanka not to storm the LTTE-held enclave.

Ambassador Blake made these remarks addressing the Serendipity Group, a body of American diplomats who served in Sri Lanka, last week in Washington DC.

He said that the United States had “a detailed coordinated plan” with the Indian and Sri Lanka governments for its Navy to rescue trapped displaced persons in Puthukudiyiruppu during the final stages of the separatist war.

Blake said, addressing the Serendipity Group forum that, however, “the Sri Lanka government killed the idea for fear that Erik Solheim (Norwegian peace broker) and I would be taken hostage by the LTTE.”

Robert Blake went on to say “there were also perceptions that it was an effort to rescue the LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.” He further said “Every person would have been transferred by US Navy boats to Sri Lanka custody.”

At this Washington forum, Robert Blake emphasized he wanted to clear “some misinformation that continues to circulate about something we worked on when I was Ambassador from 2006-2009.”

“We never had the intention of helping the LTTE,” Blake said adding that “the plan was to rescue as many IDPs whom the LTTE had refused to allow to move south through the lines of fighting and were in effect were human shields.”

Here’s how we blast Blake’s canards and expose his fabrications. And we expect him to respond to what we are stating here, as this is a very serious analysis based on Washington’s declarations, remarks and the mind-set of the state department in relation to the LTTE and the Sri Lankan state.

On May 6, 2009, exactly twelve days be¬fore the total annihilation of the LTTE with its top leadership, in a special media gathering at the State Department in Washington, the USG quite accidently disclosed its long-held notion, which was devel¬oped and nurtured within the portals of the US diplomatic mission in Colombo in the 1980s and 1990s, which was very familiar to this writer.

Mike Owens, the deputy assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian Affairs who had previously served as the political/labor officer at the US diplomatic mission in Colombo, at this May 6, 2009, special media briefing disclosed what Washington contemplates “what to do” with the Tiger leadership.

He was the first US official to reveal that the US government wished to organize the surrender of the whole LTTE corps of fighters, inclusive of its leaders, as one facet of a rescue operation that would ensure the safety of the civilians in the battle zone.

I present here the salient pronouncements made by Mr. Owens on behalf of the American administration.

(Begin Quote) We, of course, have designated the LTTE as a terrorist orga¬nization, and we certainly have no sympathy for some of the things that they’ve carried out, but I think you do have to ask a very legitimate question: Why did they have a following in the beginning? And I think it’s because some in the Tamil community do have legitimate grievances, and we need to find [italics added]—I think it’s imperative for Sri Lankans to find a way to give ev¬eryone in the community, all Sri Lankans a legitimate voice in their government. And so we want to support the government of Sri Lanka as they move forward in an effort to do exactly that.

We are trying quietly—and I can’t talk too much about this— but we are trying quietly behind the scene to find a way to bring an end to the fighting. It’s very difficult to see exactly how that’s going to happen, but we think there are a couple of elements that need to be involved, and we need to find a way for the LTTE to surrender arms possibly to a third party in the context of a pause in the fighting, to surrender their arms in exchange for some sort of limited amnesty to at least some members of the LTTE and the beginning of a political process [italics added].

Now, those are pretty vague—that’s a pretty vague out¬line, and we realize that. It’s going to require a lot of nego¬tiation with the parties involved to bring that to fruition in a really a coherent way, but that is something that is underway behind the scenes to try to find a way to reach that point.

I just want to emphasize this is what we would like to see happen, but we don’t have any illusions that this is easy to en¬gineer. It’s something that we’ve been working on very hard and quietly behind the scene, because we see—the only poten¬tial we see to bring this to an end is to have a package in which we have a pause, and the civilians were allowed to leave. And now it’s very clear that many civilians do want to leave in spite of the fact the LTTE has said earlier they do not want to leave. They do in fact want to leave.

So what we would like to see is a package, in which there is a pause, and then during that pause, not only do the civil¬ians leave but we also make some arrangements between the government and the LTTE that would involve trading off sur¬render of arms for a limited amnesty. The government of Sri Lanka has previously offered a limited amnesty. This would be for the lower level LTTE cadre, not the leadership.

And so I think one of the big questions is what to do about the leadership, and that’s certainly not easy to answer. This is a very complex and very difficult sort of thing to orchestrate. There are many problems, and we are running out of time. We really, literally, have a matter of a couple of days maybe in which we can try to get this finalized. (End Quote)

Let me connect what Mike Owens declared on May 6, 2009 in Washington to what Erik Solheim subsequently told Mark Salter:

The Norwegian chief negotiator Erik Solheim, who started his peace endeavor to lift the LTTE to a respectable position on par with the GSL, advocating a political solution to Sri Lanka’s national issues mediating between the GSL and the LTTE since the turn of the cen¬tury until the war ended in May 2009, made the following remarks in Mark Salter’s To End A Civil War. The role of the Tamil diaspora in post-LTTE era seems to have settled in his mind when he made these remarks:

“I suggested the language of the Co-Chair statement and pushed it with the support of the US. It was an appeal to both sides and was not what either of them wanted to hear. The focus was on the need for the LTTE to accept that the war had come to an end. The government wanted to push on with the war while the LTTE was demanding a ceasefire. There was a negative reaction (to the statement) from the LTTE and Tamils, who said that by calling on them to give up we were making demands on the weaker party. There was no positive reaction from the government either, but of course they were in much stronger position than the LTTE. Had the LTTE accepted our proposal, they would today have been in a posi¬tion to continue their struggle by other means, like say the Kurds in Turkey.”

The Kurds, in the form of PKK, in Turkey, are fighting to win an independent Kurdistan in Turkey.

Robert Blake needs to clarify what Mike Owens said in May 2009 from the official Washington podium, and what Erik Solheim meant. In fact, Blake and Solheim worked together very closely on LTTE and Sri Lanka issues.

Here’s my Take

The idea that the birth of the LTTE was the result of the griev¬ances of the Tamil community governed the USG policy throughout and led the United States to do the following:

• Make the LTTE a legitimate voice of the Tamil grievances by officially encouraging the GSL to accept it as an “equal” partner at the negotiating table.

While encouraging measures to drastically control the LTTEs military capability and its fundraising ability and to block its arms procurement avenues, maintain it as a pressure group of the Tamil voice so as to force the GSL hand to grant Tamil demands that had been highlighted earlier by the Ilankai Thamil Arasu Katchi (Lanka Tamil State Party or Federal Party), which was the first Tamil political party to adopt a res¬olution at its inaugural session in 1951 highlighting a demand for self-determination of the Tamil People), the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF, which adopted the separatist resolu¬tion in 1976 and even introduced it in the Massachusetts State Assembly in 1979 and the Tamil National Alliance (TNA—a creation of the LTTE). The marginalization of established democratic Tamil political parties as a result of the militar¬ily powerful LTTE reducing them as its appendices made the United States to encourage the GSL to make the LTTE an equal partner at the negotiating table.

• Next, as indicated by Mike Owens, to move the top hierarchy of the already crippled LTTE out of Sri Lanka to invigorate the debate on Tamil rights/grievances. The officials of the State Department were already in a dia¬logue with several Tamil expatriate organizations based in the United States and Europe for many months or years.

• Using the post-LTTE developments, force the GSL to adopt a policy of accountability and transparency regarding the in¬cidents that occurred from April through May 18, 2009, which are described as violations of International Humanitarian Laws (IHL), crimes against humanity, war crimes, and geno¬cide to forcibly push the political agenda professed by the FP, TULF, and LTTE on Tamil grievances, especially bringing pressure on the GSL to implement more than what is in the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution that talks of de¬volution of administrative and political power to the periph¬ery, a main objective of allowing the Tamils in the North and East of Sri Lanka to run their own lives with minimal inter¬ference from Colombo, with land and police powers, while maintaining the unitary character of the constitution.

Mike Owens was very clear at the special media briefing May 6, 2009. I reiterate, he was the first US official to reveal that the US government wished to organize the surrender of the whole LTTE corps of fighters, inclusive of its leaders, as one facet of a rescue operation that would ensure the safety of the civilians in the battle zone.

What Mike Owens declared was the official Washington policy (1) linking the LTTE to Tamil grievances (2) the reluctance to allow the total annihilation of the LTTE (3) “What to do with the leadership”, contemplating a plan “What to do with the LTTE leadership”, an organization that had been declared a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997 by the State Department.

These are the issues Ambassador Robert Blake needs to respond, and these are very serious charges dismissing his fabrications and canards at the Serendipity Groups forum in Washington last week. Facts are stubborn.

It should be borne in mind that the decisions taken at the highest level in the State Department and policy planks made known to Sri Lanka through promulgations by senior officials in Washington at all times have direct links to what the US FSOs in Colombo learn, un¬derstand, comprehend, analyze, investigate, and research. Despite the US government (USG) denouncing the terrorist tactics/maneuvers of the Tamil Tigers, the USG/State Department and (onetime) Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage were convinced that the Tigers had a significant role to play in the resolution of the ethnic/Tamil issues and that the Tigers could be used as a pressure group to persuade the GSL to be flexible enough to move away from what the Americans believed was the Sinhalese chauvinistic posture.

How and why the Americans believed in the invincibility of the LTTE, its sustenance and the outfit’s usefulness in their agenda, one directed to¬ward changing the structure of the government, is a central aspect of the US mind-set.

The question posed to Robert Blake is:

If the sole endeavor (of the United States) was to protect the unarmed civilians and facil¬itate them to move out of the battle zone, Mike Owens wouldn’t have used the following terminology. This sounded like simultaneous ef¬forts to protect the civilians—threatening the GSL to retreat from its offensive position—and facilitate the removal of the top LTTE cadre from the battle zone:

“We are trying quietly -- and I can’t talk too much about this-- but we are trying quietly behind the scene to find a way to bring an end to the fighting. It’s very difficult to see exactly how that’s going to happen, but we think there are a couple of elements that need to be involved, and we need to find a way for the LTTE to surrender arms possibly to a third party in the context of a pause in the fighting, to surrender their arms in exchange for some sort of limited amnesty to at least some members of the LTTE and the beginning of a political process.”

What Mike Owens spelled out were clear policy planks: that the LTTE clearly represented the grievances of the 11 percent minority Tamil community in Sri Lanka, and that the USG clearly believed that those grievances gave birth to the movement. Despite the USG designating it a terrorist movement, the insinuation was that it was un¬able to allow such an organization, which represents the Tamil voice be totally silenced. It is in this context that the GSL was warned not to use its fire power to harm the unarmed civilians; if it did, it would negate Washington’s effort to find out “what to do about the leader¬ship of the Tigers.”

Is this true, Ambassador Blake?

Daya Gamage -The writer served in the U.S. Department of State as a Foreign Service national at the American diplomatic mission in Colombo, Sri Lanka as its Political Specialist, and the author of the recently published book Tamil Tigers’ Debt to America: US Foreign-Policy Adventurism & Sri Lanka’s Dilemma)

- Asian Tribune –