Robert O. Blake was recently in the news following the successful passing of the US-sponsored 2013 UNHRC resolution against Sri Lanka. Blake gave an interview to BBC Sinhala in which, when asked directly with the help of a Wikileaks reference, he admitted knowing of civilian casualties [of Tamils] as the SL military continued its offensive in 2009. The BBC Sinhala website published an article based on the interview, including some direct quotes, and the entire audio recording of the interview. A few days later, the US State Department provided a full transcript of the entire audio of the interview, and it surprisingly introduced a small yet very significant error: Blake's direct acknowledgement of knowing about civilian casualties was omitted.
Chronology and links:
- March 20: US-sponsored resolution in UNHRC against SL passed
- March 22: Blake gives interview to BBC Sinhala
- March 24: BBC Sinhala publishes article and audio: United States warns of international mechanism on Sri Lanka
- March 25: BBC World News publishes article and shortened audio: US may launch Sri Lanka war crimes investigation
- March 26: The US State Department publishes its transcript of the interview: Interview With BBC Sinhala Service
Was the error made in the State Department transcript intentional or unintentional? Well, the BBC Sinhala article did a very imperfect job in transcribing. For example, they wrote "prove" instead of "proof". So there is justification for the State Department to provide a proper transcript. But if the transcript does not include the whole conversation, this is a distortion, at best. The net effect is that the omission removes Blake's clear acquiescence of the fact that he was aware of civilian casualties as the war went on in 2009. This is how the excerpt in question of the audio recording should have been transcribed as:
Question: At the same time, according to WikiLeaks cables you personally and the United States also knew about civilian casualties while the war was going on.
Assistant Secretary Blake: Correct. We were very concerned about civilian casualties, and if you look back over the record, we made many public statements about our concerns for civilian casualties.
The one-word sentence "Correct." is omitted in the State Department transcript. The BBC Sinhala article correctly conveyed the gist of the meaning conveyed by Blake in its text, and the audio on the BBC Sinhala article's page unmistakably proves it.
Perhaps the ultimate predictor of whether the omission in the full transcript was intentional or not is whether any of the online documents or media is negatively tampered with or removed in the future. Journalism on the internet is strange, where even the most professional of news outlets will take down some articles after some time and make articles difficult to search for. News multimedia postings have a smaller likelihood of being searchable, let alone even surviving at all in the long term, than the print articles. So will the BBC Sinhala interview audio stay up forever, and why does the main BBC service's article include a truncated audio? Will the article webpages themselves stay up? Will this omission be acknowledged? These questions are important at a time when Frances Harrison is rightly pointing out the SL government's obvious obfuscation at the Colomboscape literary festival.
Perhaps, in the end, questions of whether the US is obfuscating or not are not as important as whether the US continues to do the right thing for all peoples on the island, especially the Tamil-speaking peoples of Tamil Eelam, by delivering them a genuine, permanent, sustainable peace that secures their collective political rights. This is probably the best long-term strategy for US interests, considering it will embrace the future of a stable southern South Asia sooner rather than later. (Similarly, Lee Kuan Yew has advised the US to embrace China's inevitable rise sooner than later.) Instead of dwelling on past mistakes, we should look for ways to make things better as we move forward. Given that it is likely that Blake's role in what happened at the end of the war in SL in 2008-2009 is much greater than the scope of the discrepancy above, there is no one with more of an obligation to make things better than Robert O. Blake.
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