{"id":154259,"date":"2015-12-09T04:47:56","date_gmt":"2015-12-08T23:17:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=154259"},"modified":"2015-12-16T10:57:59","modified_gmt":"2015-12-16T05:27:59","slug":"loopholes-how-tamil-advocacy-penetrates-us-foreign-policy-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/loopholes-how-tamil-advocacy-penetrates-us-foreign-policy-making\/","title":{"rendered":"Loopholes: How Tamil Advocacy Penetrates US Foreign Policy Making"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Michael Roberts<\/span><\/a> \u2013<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>

Dr. Michael Roberts<\/p><\/div>\n

At the height of Eelam War IV, as the WikiLeaks material reveals, American officials in Colombo as well as Washington and New York were bombarded with email demands and\/or information from ardent Tamil advocates concerned about the deteriorating situation of the LTTE and the populace corralled within Thami\u012bilam\u2019s<\/em> declining terrain.<\/p>\n

The very diversity of fervent messages had an impact on the thinking of key American policy makers in 2009. The extremism of the vast majority of messages was immediately dismissed. But, in unplanned manner, these missiles opened the door for the US personnel of the State Department to give credence to the claims of the moderate few. This is the implication one can draw from Blake\u2019s Despatch No. 314 of 20 March 2009.<\/p>\n

I go further. In explicit conjecture I contend that the same process has been at work in the past few years, especially at the moments when the UN bureaucracy was witch-hunting Sri Lanka<\/a> in the interests of the desired regime change and\/or reform in the island. So, it is a continuing process proceeding now, TODAY.<\/p>\n

The American policy makers are directed in part by the liberal-arts thinking developed in US academic institutions, working within the limits set by USA\u2019s definition of its interests. Since the early years of this century \u201cResponsibility to Protect\u201d (or R2P) has been the new flag-bearer of hardline intervention with a moral fa\u00e7ade<\/a>. In relation to Sri Lanka this line of pressure was ratcheted up after the Government of Sri Lanka under the Rajapaksa clan defied the Western world and defeated the LTTE at war in April-May 2009 (Peiris 2007).<\/p>\n

\"Roberto-Blake-meets-President-Mahinda-Rajapaksa<\/a>Despite reservations about the LTTE among US functionaries, American realpolitik was guided by lines of policy set out by the US embassy staff in Colombo in the early 1980s<\/a> as the pathway for the easing of Sri Lanka\u2019s conflict situation: namely, devolution under a federal scheme (Gamage 2011).<\/p>\n

That may have been a reasonable notion THEN in the 1980s. But, to any knowledgeable observer in the period 2000-09, such a notion was manifestly out of place because the Sri Lankan Tamils were under the control of a fascist party led by Velupillai Pirap\u0101haran (Hoole 2001: 423-40; Bavinck 2014: 97, 158, 191, 211, 294, 325). How could a provincial unit be set up under the guidance of former Tiger personnel nurtured in fascist ways and military activity! But that is precisely what the Political Attache of the US Embassy in Colombo, Michael Owens, was pointing towards on 6th<\/sup> May 2009. This arose in the course of a public communique indicating USA\u2019s desire to negotiate an LTTE surrender to a third party via a \u201climited amnesty\u201d as a step that would initiate \u201cthe beginning of a political process\u201d (in Gamage 2014).[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

That mumbling bumbling public disclosure by Owens and the US Embassy in 2009 was not an aberration. It was in line with several American policy pronouncements in 2006-08 from such personnel as Richard Boucher<\/a> and Robert Blake<\/a>. Visiting Lanka in 2006 as Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, Boucher told a press gathering that in order \u201cto achieve its full potential Sri Lanka needs a final political settlement\u201d (see Boucher 2006). <\/strong>\u201cSri Lanka is a country of great promise and opportunity if the fighting can stop and a political solution can be agreed on that satisfies Tamil, Sinhalese and Muslim aspirations,\u201d said Ambassador Blake when addressing an audience in Chennai in October 2008 (Roberts 2015d).<\/strong> With the entry of Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State in December 2008 such inclinations would have received a further boost. Clinton does not believe in half-measures.<\/p>\n

Understood within such a context, then, Despatch No. 314 of 20th<\/sup> March 2009 from Blake in Colombo is a revelation. \u201cThe Tamil Diaspora is vocal, internet-savvy and heavily influenced by hard-line views \u2026 Ambassador and a number of Embassy officers receive e-mails from the diaspora on a daily basis, most of them expressing points of view similar to those of the demonstrators. At times these e-mails include fake or exaggerated claims posted on pro-LTTE websites\u201d<\/p>\n

That evaluation is discretion personified. But Blake then goes on to say that<\/p>\n