Classic case of disappearance in UK’s hit TV series, Blake-7 season one, 1978. |  | Modern-day Blake:
American Ambassador | 
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The UK’s hit television series in the late seventies, BLAKE-7, was such an inspiration for many science fiction movies including Babylon 5 and star trek. In BLAKE-7 the main characters, including the star attraction Blake him-self, carry transponders, a small device in which people transports people from one location to another. Earlier this week the modern-day BLAKE-7, the American ambassador Mr. Blake, tried hard to make a disappearing act of more than three decades of a troubled Island’s ethnic cleansing. As always his lack of depth on the decades-old conflict made the difference from the classic BLAKE –7 series to the modern-day ambassador Blake. The latter one was a fake one. Here we have compiled our observation of the classic Blake act.
Blake’s amnesia: “We are concerned about the situation, but we also think there is hope. We are concerned because the ceasefire has broken down and there has been a lot of fighting in the past year and there have been severe humanitarian consequences and human rights problems for the people of Sri Lanka. But we also think there is hope for the people of Sri Lanka because there is a process already under way in the All party Representatives Committee, that can lead to a political solution to the conflict”
Our observation: Mr. Blake always gets entangled in the details and often forgets about the history of the island’s troubled ethnic conflict. Here he pinned down the hope on so-called APRC and yet failed to understand the earlier all party conferences such as late President JR. Jayawardena’s now famous or infamous all party round table conferences in the eighties, they had the same problem as the current APRC. They were both DOA (dead on arrival). In this case, the earlier round table conference was all about nothing and the current APRC was created to make nothing out of nothing. Now that is an improvement. If Mr. Blake is head over heels on the current APRC he was quite shy on May 4th, 2007 in which the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) submitted a seventies style scattered administration package as a solution to the current ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka. It was so backward thinking that even they (SLFP) themselves had to take it back to amend their own proposals. With this type of batting average on APRC it was funny the Mr. Blake had to even comment on APRC.
Blake’s mumbling: “That has been the case in many conflicts but there is no such thing as a conflict that has no solution to it. If we look around the world, we see many examples of so called insoluble problems that the international community has in fact been able to solve. In many cases, it was because of the courageous leaderships within the countries themselves. Take the case of Northern Ireland and the Aceh settlement in Indonesia. I believe that Sri Lanka is capable of developing its own solution as well. I spent most of my career in the middle east where there is deep enmity between the Arabs and the Israelis. But Sri Lanka is very different from the middle east. You have Tamils and Sinhalese and Muslims who have lived together for centuries and even in Colombo 40% of the population is Tamil. And there is intermarriage between the communities. So this is not an ethnic conflict per se. people have lived very harmoniously together and are capable of doing so. So the outlines of a solution are much easier to define here than in a place like the middle east. It is basically a case of all the parties getting together and setting aside their partisan differences for the sake of the nation”.
Our observation: We had a hard problem reading his answers or his mumbling. Here he is quite continently trying the Blake-7 disappearance act on a conflict that had so far killed more than 70,000 people and almost 4,000 in the last year. If one can say that there is no ethnic cleansing in the island nation, one not only lies to oneself but also to one’s soul, the latter has a far reaching negative implication as a human being. The only thing we got from it was the last sentence. “all the parties getting together and setting aside their partisan differences for the sake of the nation,” in this case the Tamil nation.
Blake’s observation: “…….. Almost every Tamil that I speak to, wants a federal solution within a united Sri Lanka. They do not want a separate Eelam. One of the arguments against any kind of negotiations is that Prabhakaran will never agree to anything less than an independent state. I don’t believe that’s true. I believe that there is great pressure on the LTTE to agree to some sort of federal solution or a power sharing proposal within a united Sri Lanka, and that the overwhelming majority of Tamils here and overseas will support such a solution”.
Our observation: Mr. Blake had some occasional encounters with some Tamils in which he had some tea and biscuits in the backdrop sunset at Galle-Face beach and then talked some politics and came to the above conclusions. The fact the he could not name a single legitimate Tamil political and rehabilitation organization, such as Tamil National Alliance (TNA), Swiss Tamil Organization (STO), or Tamil Refugee Rehabilitation Organization (TRRO) of USA says many things about Mr. Blake’s antics. Which Tamil did he talk to? As far as putting the pressure on LTTE is concerned, the ambassador would not know because he had no contact with a “terrorist” organization. In addition, the overseas Tamils were quite conveniently ignored, as our letters were not answered by Mr. Blake; thus the enigma continues: why would he even say all of the above and mislead the American people?
Blake’s comments: “But we do hope that if the APRC process comes up with a credible solution and the President is able to work on improving human rights, then we will be able to resume that programme again”
Our observation: Mr. Blake quite naively in said, “improving human rights.” He sounds like the Sri Lankan state had received some bad grades in a college course called “human rights –101” and had to do some make-up homework to get better at it. The fact that the President of a nation, which is accused of abduction and extra judicial killings, says, “ Many of those people who are said to have been abducted are in England, Germany, gone abroad. They have made complaints that they were abducted, but when they return they don’t say,” shows that the Sri Lankan government simply does not care. And yet, Mr. Blake is asking the Sri Lankan government to do some extra credit homework to get better at something that never existed. This is an insult to the intelligence of the American people.
All in all, Mr. Blake tries to portray that the situation in Sri Lanka’s ethnic cleansing of the Tamil people, can be patched up with some Dollar Store bandages called APRC and fails to address the American people as well as the international community to the core issue of the conflict: ethnic cleansing. Thus, Mr. Blake does portray the modern day BLAKE-7: If you are killed by a state terror, we will make you disappear into thin air.” But the resilient Tamil people say what the BLAKE-7 movie series famous motto said: “ I plan to live forever, or die trying.” |
