Risky Geopolitical Game: Washington Plays “Tibet Roulette” with China

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Risky Geopolitical Game: Washington Plays “Tibet Roulette” with China

The Olympic Torch Relay Campaign

Reflections by Comrade Fidel Castro: The Chinese Victory

For Your Information:
Stop the War Coalition Retracts References to Tibet

Washington has obviously decided on an ultra-high risk geopolitical game with Beijing by fanning the flames of violence in Tibet just at this sensitive time in their relations and on the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. It's part of an escalating strategy of destabilisation of China which has been initiated by the Bush Administration over the past months. It also includes the attempt to ignite an anti-China Saffron Revolution in the neighbouring Myanmar region, bringing US-led NATO troops into Darfur where China's oil companies are developing potentially huge oil reserves. It includes counter moves across mineral-rich Africa. And it includes strenuous efforts to turn India into a major new US forward base on the Asian sub-continent to be deployed against China, though evidence to date suggests the Indian government is being very cautious not to upset Chinese relations.

            The current Tibet operation apparently got the green light in October last year when George Bush agreed to meet the Dalai Lama for the first time publicly in Washington. The President of the United States is not unaware of the high stakes of such an insult to Beijing. Bush deepened the affront to America's largest trading partner, China, by agreeing to attend as the US Congress awarded the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal.

            The immediate expressions of support for the crimson monks of Tibet from George Bush, Condi Rice, France's Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany's Angela Merkel most recently took on dimensions of the absurd. Ms Merkel announced she would boycott attending the August Beijing Summer Olympics as her protest at the Beijing treatment of the Tibetan monks. What her press secretary omitted is that she had not even planned to go in the first place.

            She was followed by an announcement that Poland's Prime Minister, the pro-Washington Donald Tusk, would also stay away, along with pro-US Czech President Vaclav Klaus. It is unclear whether they also hadn't planned to go in the first place but it made for dramatic press headlines.

            The recent wave of violent protests and documented attacks by Tibetan monks against Han Chinese residents began on March 10 when several hundred monks marched on Lhasa to demand release of other monks allegedly detained for celebrating the award of the US Congress' Gold Medal last October. The monks were joined by other monks marching to protest Beijing rule on the 49th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule.

The Geopolitical Game

            As the Chinese government itself was clear to point out, the sudden eruption of anti-Chinese violence in Tibet, a new phase in the movement led by the exiled Dalai Lama, was suspiciously timed to try to put the spotlight on Beijing's human rights record on the eve of the coming Olympics. The Beijing Olympics are an event seen in China as a major acknowledgement of the arrival of a new prosperous China on the world stage.

            The background actors in the Tibet “Crimson revolution” actions confirm that Washington has been working overtime in recent months to prepare another of its infamous Colour Revolutions, these fanning public protests designed to inflict maximum embarrassment on Beijing. The actors on the ground in and outside Tibet are the usual suspects, tied to the US State Department, including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the CIA's Freedom House through its chairman, Bette Bao Lord and her role in the International Committee for Tibet, as well as the Trace Foundation financed by the wealth of George Soros through his daughter, Andrea Soros Colombel.

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has accused the Dalai Lama of orchestrating the latest unrest to sabotage the Olympic Games “in order to achieve their unspeakable goal”, Tibetan independence.

            Bush telephoned his Chinese counterpart, President Hu Jintao, to pressure for talks between Beijing and the exiled Dalai Lama. The White House said that Bush, “raised his concerns about the situation in Tibet and encouraged the Chinese government to engage in substantive dialogue with the Dalai Lama's representatives and to allow access for journalists and diplomats.”

            President Hu reportedly told Bush the Dalai Lama must “stop his sabotage” of the Olympics before Beijing takes a decision on talks with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said.

Dalai Lama's Odd Friends

            In the West the image of the Dalai Lama has been so much promoted that in many circles he is deemed almost a God. While the spiritual life of the Dalai Lama is not our focus, it is relevant to note briefly the circles he has chosen to travel in most of his life.

The Dalai Lama travels in what can only be called rather conservative political circles. What is generally forgotten today is that during the 1930s the Nazis including Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler and other top Nazi Party leaders regarded Tibet as the holy site of the survivors of the lost Atlantis, and the origin of the “Nordic pure race”.

            When he was 11 and already designated Dalai Lama, he was befriended by Heinrich Harrer, a Nazi Party member and officer of Heinrich Himmler's feared SS. Far from the innocent image of him in the popular Hollywood film with Brad Pitt, Harrer was an elite SS member at the time he met the 11-year-old Dalai Lama and became his tutor in “the world outside Tibet”. While only the Dalai Lama knows the contents of Harrer's private lessons, the two remained friends until Harrer died a ripe 93 in 2006. ^[1]

            That sole friendship, of course, does not define a person's character, but it is interesting in the context of later friends. In April 1999, along with Margaret Thatcher, and former Beijing Ambassador, CIA Director and President, George H.W. Bush, the Dalai Lama demanded the British government release Augusto Pinochet, the former fascist dictator of Chile and a longtime CIA client who was visiting England. The Dalai Lama urged that Pinochet not be forced to go to Spain where he was wanted to stand trial for crimes against humanity. The Dalai Lama had close ties to Miguel Serrano, ^[2] head of Chile's National Socialist Party, a proponent of something called esoteric Hitlerism. ^[3]

            Leaving aside at this point the claim of the Dalai Lama to divinity, what is indisputable is that he has been surrounded and financed in significant part, since his flight into Indian exile in 1959, by various US and Western intelligence services and their gaggle of NGOs. It is the agenda of the Washington friends of the Dalai Lama that is relevant here.

The NED at Work Again

            As author Michael Parenti notes in his work, Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth, “during the 1950s and 60s, the CIA actively backed the Tibetan cause with arms, military training, money, air support and all sorts of other help.” The US-based American Society for a Free Asia, a CIA front, publicised the cause of Tibetan resistance, with the Dalai Lama's eldest brother, Thubtan Norbu, playing an active role in the group. The Dalai Lama's second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup, established an intelligence operation with the CIA in 1951. It was later upgraded into a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet, according to Parenti. ^[4]

            According to declassified US intelligence documents released in the late 1990s, “for much of the 1960s, the CIA provided the Tibetan exile movement with $1.7 million a year for operations against China, including an annual subsidy of $180,000 for the Dalai Lama.” ^[5]

            With help of the CIA, the Dalai Lama fled to Dharamsala, India where he lives to the present. He continues to receive millions of dollars in backing today, not from the CIA but from a more innocuous-sounding CIA front organisation, funded by the US Congress, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The NED has been instrumental in every US-backed Colour Revolution destabilisation from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine to Myanmar. Its funds go to back opposition media and global public relations campaigns to popularise their pet opposition candidates.

            As in the other recent Colour Revolutions, the US Government is fanning the flames of destabilisation against China by funding opposition protest organisations inside and outside Tibet through its arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

            The NED was founded by the Reagan Administration in the early 1980s, on the recommendation of Bill Casey, Reagan's Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), following a series of high-publicity exposures of CIA assassinations and destabilisations of unfriendly regimes. The NED was designed to pose as an independent NGO, one step removed from the CIA and Government agencies so as to be less conspicuous, presumably. The first acting President of the NED, Allen Weinstein, commented to the Washington Post that, “A lot of what we [the NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” ^[6]

            American intelligence historian, William Blum states, “The NED played an important role in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, funding key components of Oliver North's shadowy ‘Project Democracy’. This network privatised US foreign policy, waged war, ran arms and drugs, and engaged in other equally charming activities. In 1987, a White House spokesman stated that those at NED ‘run Project Democracy’.” ^[7]

            The most prominent pro-Dalai Lama Tibet independence organisation today is the International Campaign for Tibet, founded in Washington in 1988. Since at least 1994 the ICT has been receiving funds from the NED. The ICT awarded their annual Light of Truth award in 2005 to Carl Gershman, founder of the NED. Other ICT award winners have included the German Friedrich Naumann Foundation and Czech leader, Vaclav Havel. The ICT Board of Directors is peopled with former US State Department officials including Gare Smith and Julia Taft. ^[8]

            Another especially active anti-Beijing organisation is the US-based Students for a Free Tibet, founded in 1994 in New York City as a project of US Tibet Committee and the NED-financed International Campaign for Tibet (ICT). The SFT is most known for unfurling a 450 foot banner atop the Great Wall in China; calling for a free Tibet, and accusing Beijing of wholly unsubstantiated claims of genocide against Tibet. Apparently it makes good drama to rally naïve students.

            The SFT was among five organisations which this past January that proclaimed start of a “Tibetan people's uprising” on Jan 4 this year and co-founded a temporary office in charge of coordination and financing.

            Harry Wu is another prominent Dalai Lama supporter against Beijing. He became notorious for claiming falsely in a 1996 Playboy interview that he had “videotaped a prisoner whose kidneys were surgically removed while he was alive, and then the prisoner was taken out and shot. The tape was broadcast by BBC.” The BBC film showed nothing of the sort, but the damage was done. How many people check old BBC archives? Wu, a retired Berkeley professor who left China after imprisonment as a dissident, is head of the Laogai Research Foundation, a tax-exempt organisation whose main funding is from the NED. ^[9]

            Among related projects, the US Government-financed NED also supports the Tibet Times newspaper, run out of the Dalai Lama's exile base at Dharamsala, India. The NED also funds the Tibet Multimedia Centre for “information dissemination that addresses the struggle for human rights and democracy in Tibet”, also based in Dharamsala. And NED finances the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy.

            In short, US State Department and US intelligence community finger prints are all over the upsurge around the Free Tibet movement and the anti-Han Chinese attacks of March. The question to be asked is why, and especially why now?

Tibet's Raw Minerals Treasure

            Tibet is of strategic import to China not only for its geographical location astride the border with India, Washington's newest anti-China ally in Asia. Tibet is also a treasure of minerals and also oil. Tibet contains some of the world's largest uranium and borax deposits, one half of the world's lithium, the largest copper deposits in Asia, enormous iron deposits, and over 80,000 gold mines. Tibet's forests are the largest timber reserve at China's disposal; as of 1980, an estimated $54 billion worth of trees had been felled and taken by China. Tibet also contains some of the largest oil reserves in the region. ^[10]

            On the Tibet Autonomous Region's border along the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is also a vast oil and mineral region in the Qaidam Basin, known as a “treasure basin”. The basin has 57 different types of mineral resources with proven reserves including petroleum, natural gas, coal, crude salt, potassium, magnesium, lead, zinc and gold. These mineral resources have a potential economic value of 15 trillion yuan or US$1.8 trillion. Proven reserves of potassium, lithium and crude salt in the basin are the biggest in China.

            And situated as it is, on the “roof of the world”, Tibet is perhaps the world's most valuable water source. Tibet is the source of seven of Asia's greatest rivers which provide water for 2 billion people. He who controls Tibet's water has a mighty powerful geopolitical lever over all Asia.

            But the prime interest of Tibet for Washington today is its potential to act as a lever to destabilise and blackmail the Beijing Government.

Washington's “Nonviolence as a Form of Warfare”

            The events in Tibet since March 10 have been played in Western media with little regard to accuracy or independent cross-checking. Most of the pictures blown up in European and US newspapers and TV have not even been of Chinese military oppression of Tibetan lamas or monks. They have been shown to be in most cases either Reuters or AFP pictures of Han Chinese being beaten by Tibetan monks in paramilitary organisations. In some instances German TV stations ran video pictures of beatings that were not even from Tibet but rather by Nepalese police in Kathmandu. ^[11]

            The western media complicity simply further underlies that the actions around Tibet are part of a well-orchestrated destabilisation effort on the part of Washington. What few people realise is that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was also instrumental, along with Gene Sharp's misnamed Albert Einstein Institution through Colonel Robert Helvey, in encouraging the student protests at Tiananmen Square in June 1989. The Albert Einstein Institution, as it describes itself, specialises in “nonviolence as a form of warfare”. ^[12]

            Colonel Helvey was formerly with the Defence Intelligence Agency stationed in Myanmar. Helvey trained in Hong Kong the student leaders from Beijing in mass demonstration techniques which they were to use in the Tiananmen Square incident of June 1989. He is now believed acting as an adviser to the Falun Gong in similar civil disobedience techniques. Helvey nominally retired from the army in 1991, but had been working with the Albert Einstein Institution and George Soros' Open Society Foundation long before then. In its annual report for 2004 Helvey's Albert Einstein Institution admitted to advising people in Tibet. ^[13]

            With the emergence of the Internet and mobile telephone use, the US Pentagon has refined an entirely new form of regime change and political destabilisation. As one researcher of the phenomenon behind the wave of colour revolutions, Jonathan Mowat, describes it:

            “What we are seeing is civilian application of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's 'Revolution in Military Affairs' doctrine, which depends on highly mobile small group deployments 'enabled' by 'real time' intelligence and communications. Squads of soldiers taking over city blocks with the aid of 'intelligence helmet' video screens that give them an instantaneous overview of their environment, constitute the military side. Bands of youth converging on targeted intersections in constant dialogue on cell phones constitute the doctrine's civilian application.

            “This parallel should not be surprising since the US military and National Security Agency subsidised the development of the Internet, cellular phones, and software platforms. From their inception, these technologies were studied and experimented with in order to find the optimal use in a new kind of warfare. The 'revolution' in warfare that such new instruments permit has been pushed to the extreme by several specialists in psychological warfare. Although these military utopians have been working in high places, (for example the RAND Corporation), for a very long time, to a large extent they only took over some of the most important command structures of the US military apparatus with the victory of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon of Donald Rumsfeld.” ^[14]

Goal to Control China

            Washington policy has used and refined these techniques of “revolutionary nonviolence”, and NED operations embodied a series of “democratic” or soft coup projects as part of a larger strategy which would seek to cut China off from access to its vital external oil and gas reserves.

            The 1970s’ quote attributed to then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a proponent of British geopolitics in an American context comes to mind: “If you control the oil you control entire nations.”

            The destabilisation attempt by Washington using Tibet, no doubt with quiet “help” from its friends in British and other US-friendly intelligence services, is part of a clear pattern.

            It includes Washington's “Saffron revolution” attempts to destabilise Myanmar. It includes the ongoing effort to get NATO troops into Darfur to block China's access to strategically vital oil resources there and elsewhere in Africa. It includes attempts to foment problems in Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan and to disrupt China's vital new energy pipeline projects to Kazakhstan. The earlier Asian Great Silk Road trade routes went through Tashkent in Uzbekistan and Almaty in Kazakhstan for geographically obvious reasons, in a region surrounded by major mountain ranges. Geopolitical control of Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan, Kazakhstan would enable control of any potential pipeline routes between China and Central Asia just as the encirclement of Russia controls pipeline and other ties between it and western Europe, China, India and the Middle East, where China depends on uninterrupted oil flows from Iran, Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries.

Behind the Strategy to Encircle China

            In this context, a revealing New York Council on Foreign Relations analysis in their Foreign Affairs magazine from Zbigniew Brzezinski from September/October 1997 is worth quoting. Brzezinski, a protégé of David Rockefeller and a follower of the founder of British geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder, is today the foreign policy adviser to Presidential candidate, Barack Obama. In 1997 he revealingly wrote:

            “Eurasia is home to most of the world's politically assertive and dynamic states. All the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia. The world's most populous aspirants to regional hegemony, China and India, are in Eurasia, as are all the potential political or economic challengers to American primacy. After the United States, the next six largest economies and military spenders are there, as are all but one of the world's overt nuclear powers, and all but one of the covert ones. Eurasia accounts for 75 percent of the world's population; 60 percent of its GNP, and 75 percent of its energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia's potential power overshadows even America's.

            “Eurasia is the world's axial super-continent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy...” ^[15] (emphasis mine-W.E.).

            This statement, written well before the US-led bombing of former Yugoslavia and the US military occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, or its support of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline, puts Washington pronouncements about “ridding the world of tyranny” and about spreading democracy, into a somewhat different context from the one usually mentioned by George W. Bush of others.

            It's about global hegemony, not democracy. It should be no surprise when powers such as China are not convinced that giving Washington such overwhelming power is in China's national interest, any more than Russia thinks that it would be a step towards peace to let NATO gobble up Ukraine and Georgia and put US missiles on Russia's doorstep “to defend against threat of Iranian nuclear attack on the United States”.

            The US-led destabilisation in Tibet is part of a strategic shift of great significance. It comes at a time when the US economy and the US dollar, still the world's reserve currency, are in the worst crisis since the 1930s. It is significant that the US Administration sends Wall Street banker, former Goldman Sachs chairman, Henry Paulson to Beijing in the midst of its efforts to embarrass Beijing in Tibet. Washington is literally playing with fire. China long ago surpassed Japan as the world's largest holder of foreign currency reserves, now in the range of $1.5 trillions, most of which are invested in US Treasury debt instruments. Paulson knows well that were Beijing to decide it could bring the dollar to its knees by selling only a small portion of its US debt on the market.

Footnotes

1. Ex-Nazi, Dalai's tutor Harrer dies at 93, The Times of India, 9 Jan 2006, in http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1363946,prtpage-1.cms.
2. Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, New York University Press, 2001, p. 177.
3. Goldner, Colin, Mönchischer Terror auf dem Dach der Welt Teil 1: Die Begeisterung für den Dalai Lama und den tibetischen Buddhismus, March 26, 2008, excerpted from the book Dalai Lama: Fall eines Gottkönigs, Alibri Verlag,, new edition to appear April 2008, reproduced in http://www.jungewelt.de/2008/03-27/006.php.
4. Parenti, Michael, Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth, June 2007, in www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html.
5. Mann, Jim, CIA funded covert Tibet exile campaign in 1960s, The Age (Australia), Sept. 16, 1998.
6. Ignatius, D., Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups, The Washington Post, 22 September 1991.
7. Blum, William, The NED and “Project Democracy,” January 2000, in www.friendsoftibet.org/databank/usdefence/usd5.html
8. Barker, Michael, “Democratic Imperialism”: Tibet, China and the National Endowment for Democracy, Global Research, August 13, 2007, www.globalresearch.ca.
9. McGehee, Ralph, Ralph McGehee' s Archive on JFK Place, CIA Operations in China Part III, May 2, 1996, in www.acorn.net/jfkplace/03/RM/RM.china-for.
10. US Tibet Committee, Fifteen things you should know about Tibet and China, in http://ustibetcommittee.org/facts/facts.html.
11. Goldner, Colin, Mönchischer Terror auf dem Dach der Welt Teil 2: Krawalle im Vorfeld der Olympischen Spiele, op cit.
12. Mowat, Jonathan, The new Gladio in action?, Online Journal, Mar 19, 2005, in http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/printer_308.shtml.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Brzezinski, Zbigniew, A Geostrategy for Eurasia, Foreign Affairs, 76:5, September/October 1997.

 

www.german-foreign-policy.com, April 8, 2008

Conference reports and the research of a Canadian journalist reveal that a German Foreign Ministry front organisation is playing a decisive role in the preparations of the anti-Chinese Tibet campaign. According to this information, the campaign is being orchestrated from a Washington based headquarters. It had been assigned the task of organising worldwide “protests” at a conference organised by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation (affiliated with the German Free Democratic Party – FDP) in May 2007. The plans were developed with the collaboration of the US State Department and the self-proclaimed Tibetan Government in Exile and call for high profile actions along the route of the Olympic Torch Relay and are supposed to reach a climax in August during the games in Beijing. The campaign began already last summer and is now profiting from the current uprising in the west of the People's Republic of China that is receiving prominent coverage in the German media. The uprising was initiated with murderous pogrom-like attacks by Tibetan gangs on non-Tibetan members of the population, including the Muslim Chinese minority. Numerous deaths of non-Tibetans provoked a reaction of the Chinese security forces.

            According to the research by a Canadian journalist, a conference organised by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation (FNSt) gave the impetus to the current anti-Chinese Tibet campaign that violently forced the interruption of the Olympian Torch Relay in Paris last Monday.^[1] The conference was the fifth “International Tibet Support Groups Conference”, that was held from May 11-14, 2007 in Brussels. According to FNSt information this conference was supposed to do nothing other than the four preceding conferences ^[2] – “co-ordinate the work of the international Tibet groups and consolidate the links between them with the central Tibetan Government in Exile.”^[3] The German foundation, which is largely state financed, began the conference preparations in March 2005, and coordinated its plans with the Dalai Lama at his headquarters in the self-proclaimed Tibetan Government in Exile in Dharamsala, India. More than 300 participants from 56 countries, 36 Tibetan associations and 145 Tibet support groups were represented at the conference.

Roadmap

After several days of consultations the conference ended with a concerted “plan of action”. The paper is entitled “Roadmap for the Tibet Movement for the Coming Years” covering four areas of interest: “political support for negotiations”, “human rights”, “environment and development” and “the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing”. The results of the conference are directed to the Tibetan people as well as “their supporters around the world”.^[4] Rolf Berndt, a member of the FNSt's executive council in Brussels, declared that the Olympic Games “are an excellent opportunity” to publicly promote the cause of the “Tibet Movement”.^[5] The conference participants agreed to make the Olympics the single focus of attack for their activities for the next 15 months.^[6] They hired a full-time organiser for their campaign, who has since been directing the worldwide Tibet actions from their Washington headquarters.

State Department

The decisions taken at the conference in Brussels, prepared by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, are particularly significant not only because of the large number of participants but also because of the influential politicians who helped in their formulation. For example the self-proclaimed Tibetan Government in Exile, which enjoys much prestige among separatists, was represented by its “Prime Minister” Samdong Rinpoche. Also attending was another eminent politician from the Indian Himachal Pradesh state, bordering on the People's Republic of China, where the town Dharamsala is located, the “seat” of the Tibetan “Government in Exile”. A brisk interchange takes place between Himachan Pradesh and the Chinese autonomous region of Tibet. Paula Dobriansky, the Undersecretary of State in the US State Department and special coordinator for Tibet questions also participated. She was a member of the National Security Council already in the Reagan Administration, continued her career in the State Department during the administration of President Bush Sr. and since 2001 was again in the US foreign ministry. Ms Drobriansky is considered to be one of the members of the neo-conservative inner circle in the Bush Administration and ranks as a hard-liner capable of imposing policy.

Every Day

As a Canadian journalist learned through his research, the campaign headquarters in Washington, that had been decided upon at the conference in Brussels, has been able to develop rather successful activities. Already at the beginning of August 2007, exactly one year before the opening of the Olympics, a close associate organised a high profile action at the tourist filled Great Wall to the north of Beijing. She maintains close contact to the Tibetan “Government in Exile”.^[7] Another close associate recently orchestrated the disturbance of the Olympic Torch Relay in Greece, seen on television around the world. The Washington headquarters is orchestrating other “protests” intended to disturb the Torch Relay. The campaign will reach its climax during the Olympic games in August. “We are determined to have non-violent direct action in the heart of Beijing, inside the Games, every day,” one activist declared.^[8]

Merciless

The anti-Chinese Tibet campaign, initiated under the direction of a German Foreign Ministry front organisation (Friedrich Naumann Foundation) and a high-ranking representative of the US State Department, is developing its full efficacy in the aftermath of the uprisings in West People's Republic of China that began only a few days before the start of the Torch Relay. Whereas the German media mainly reported on brutal attacks of the Chinese security forces, eye-witness accounts provide a different picture of what happened. The British journalist, James Miles (“The Economist”), who was in Lhasa from March 12-19, reports of pogrom-like attacks by Tibetan gangs on non-Tibetan members of the population of the city, among them the Muslim minority. According to Miles, the shops of Tibetan merchants were marked and left unscathed while all other shops were plundered, destroyed or set afire.^[9] In one building alone five textile saleswomen were burned to death. Besides Miles, western tourists also described the attacks on non-Tibetans. One Canadian saw how a group of Tibetans beat a Chinese motorcyclist and proceeded to “mercilessly” stone him. “Eventually they got him on the ground, they were hitting him on the head with stones until he lost consciousness. I believe that young man was killed,'' reported the tourist.^[10]

Manipulations

Whereas Miles was describing the reluctant reactions of the Chinese security forces in an interview broadcast over CNN, the German media is using the uprisings as a backdrop to represent brutal Chinese repression. Facts obviously play a subordinate role. In the meantime, television channels and daily journals have had to admit manipulations of pictures. Film sequences with Nepalese policemen beating demonstrators were sold as documentation of alleged Chinese police attacks.^[11] The security forces' saving a boy from an attacking Tibetan mob was coarsely labelled a violent arrest. Even Miles' report was editorially presented in a context to focus on Chinese repression. For the purpose of comparison, german-foreign-policy.com documents excerpts of a CNN interview with the British journalist as well as the corresponding passage from a renowned German daily.^[12] (Click here .)

Anticipation

The pogrom-like mob-violence not only created the necessary media profile for the current Tibet campaign, initiated with the help of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, it also permits an insight into the character of Tibetan separatism. The “prime minister” of the Tibetan “Exile Government”, who had participated in the formulation of the plan of action at the May 2007 Tibet Conference in Brussels, had already at the end of the 1990s, expounded in the German media on his views of the future of non-Tibetans, who had immigrated to Tibet over the past 50 years. In the case of a successful secession, they will have to “return to China, or if they would like to remain, be treated as foreigners”. He explained the planned measures: “they will, in any case, not be allowed to participate in the political life.”^[13] The prospect of discrimination against all non-Tibetan members of the population was anticipated in mid-March by mobs in their bloody attacks on Chinese and members of the Muslim minority.

            Please read also Strategies of Attrition (I) , Strategies of Attrition (II) , Strategies of Attrition (III), Strategies of Attrition (IV) and The Olympic Lever.

Footnotes

[1] Doug Saunders: How three Canadians upstaged Beijing; Globe and Mail 29.03.2008. Die Konferenz wurde von der Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung in Zusammenarbeit mit der selbsternannten tibetischen Exilregierung und einem interfraktionellen Zusammenschluss des belgischen Parlaments durchgeführt.
[2] Die ersten vier “International Tibet Support Groups Conferences” fanden 1990 (Dharamsala), 1996 (Bonn), 2000 (Berlin) und 2003 (Prag) statt. Bereits die zweite Konferenz wurde von der Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung organisiert.
[3] Gerhardt kritisiert Belgien nach Absage des Dalai-Lama-Besuchs; www.fnst-freiheit.org 11.05.2007
[4] Brussels Tibet conference roadmap for peace in Tibet; www.tibet.com 14.05.2007
[5] Valedictory Speech, International Tibet Support Groups Conference 5th, Dr. h.c. Rolf Berndt, Executive Director, Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung fuer die Freiheit, Brussels, 14th May 2007
[6], [7}, [8] Doug Saunders: How three Canadians upstaged Beijing; Globe and Mail 29.03.2008
[9] Transcript: James Miles interview on Tibet; CNN 20.03.2008
[10] Chinese beaten mercilessly – tourists; Herald Sun 19.03.2008
[11] Fotos aus Tibet; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 24.03.2008
[12] see also Augenzeuge
[13] “99 Prozent der Tibeter vertrauen in Seine Heiligkeit”; Berliner Zeitung 20.10.1997. Ähnlich hat sich erst kürzlich der Dalai Lama geäußert. “Alle Chinesen, die Tibetisch sprechen und die tibetische Kultur respektieren, können bleiben”, sagte er einer deutschen Zeitung – mit einer Einschränkung: “sofern es nicht zu viele sind”. “China mischt sich auch in Deutschlands Angelegenheiten ein”; Süddeutsche Zeitung 21.09.2007

March 31, 2008 (extracts)

[...] The works of prestigious US historical researchers divulge what took place in the Chinese territory of Tibet.

            Kenneth Conboy's The CIA's Secret War in Tibet (University Press, Kansas) describes the sordid details of the conspiracy. William Leary calls it “an excellent and impressive study of a major CIA covert operation during the Cold War”.

            For over two centuries, no country in the world had recognised Tibet as an independent nation. It was considered to be an integral part of China. In 1950, India conceived it as such, following the triumph of the communist revolution. England assumed the same stance. Until the Second World War, the United States considered it a part of China and even brought pressures to bear on England in this connection. Following the war, however, they saw it as a religious stronghold that could be used against communism.

            When the People's Republic of China implemented the agrarian reform on Tibetan soil, the elite saw its properties and interests undermined and opposed the measures. This led to an armed uprising in 1959. Tibet's armed rebellion – as opposed to those in Guatemala, Cuba and other nations, where fighting took place under truly harsh conditions – was prepared for years by US secret services, as these studies reveal.

            Another book – which essays an apology of the CIA – Mikel Dunshun's Buddha's Warriors, tells the story of how the agency took hundreds of Tibetans to the United States, led and equipped the rebellion, parachuted armaments to Tibetan fighters and trained them in their use. The rebels moved on horseback, as Arab warriors once did. The book's prologue was written by the Dalai Lama, who writes: “Though I am deeply convinced that the struggle of Tibetans will succeed only through a long-term and peaceful process, I have always admired these freedom fighters for their courage and their unwavering determination.”

            The Dalai Lama, bestowed with the US Congress' Gold Medal, praised George W. Bush for his efforts in defence of freedom, democracy and human rights.

            The Dalai Lama called the war in Afghanistan a war of “liberation”, the Korean War a war of “semi-liberation” and the Vietnam War a “failure”. [...]

            There are those who suffer from Chino-phobia, a condition shared by many Westerners, accustomed by their education and cultural differences to regard whatever comes from China contemptuously.

            I was still virtually a child when people already spoke of a “yellow peril”. The Chinese revolution seemed impossible back then. The true causes behind anti-Chinese sentiments were racist at root.

            Why is imperialism so intent on forcing China, directly or indirectly, to lose its international significance?

            Some time ago, that is to say, 50 years ago, it sought to deny it the prerogatives it had heroically earned for itself as a full member of the Security Council. Later, highlighting the mistakes that led to the Tiananmen Square protests, it deified the Statue of Liberty, the emblem of an empire which today embodies the negation of all freedoms.

            The People's Republic of China passed legislation which stood out in proclaiming and enforcing respect for the rights and cultures of 55 ethnic minorities.

            The People's Republic of China is, at the same time, highly sensitive with regards to all things related to the integrity of its territory.

            The campaign orchestrated against China is like a bugle call aimed at unleashing an attack on the country's well-earned success and against its people, who will host the next Olympic Games.

            The Cuban government issued a declaration categorically expressing its support of China in connection with the campaign undertaken against it on the issue of Tibet. This was the right stance to assume. China respects the rights of its citizens to hold religious beliefs or not. In China, there are Muslim, Catholic and non-Catholic Christian and other religious groups, not to mention dozens of ethnic minorities, whose rights are guaranteed by the Chinese constitution.

            In our Communist Party, one's religion does not represent an obstacle in the way of becoming a Party member.

            I respect the Dalai Lama's right to believe, but I am not obliged to believe in the Dalai Lama.

            I do have many reasons to believe in China's victory.

Fidel Castro Ruz
March 31, 2008
5:15 pm

For the full item, see “The Chinese Victory” Parts I and II available here and here .

 

WDIE is posting the following correspondence between the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CPGB-ML) and the Stop the War Coalition for the reader’s information.

           
Letter sent by CPGB-ML to Stop The War Coalition
By email on 11 April 2008

            Dear Officers

            The Stop the War Coalition (StWC) Newsletter No 1039 of 7 April 2008 contained the following inexcusable statements in the section on the National Demonstration for Palestine:

            "While the absolute right of the Tibetans (sic) people to be free of Chinese occupation – which we should all support – gets acres of media coverage and is openly supported by George Bush, Gordon Brown and government leaders across the world because it fits their political agenda, the plight of the Palestinian people continues, largely un-recorded and un-opposed by the very same politicians."

            It goes on further to complain "the world leaders so quick protest (sic) against China in support of the Tibetan's just cause, turn a blind eye to Israel's crimes". (Our emphasis)

            The CPGB-ML, as an affiliate of the StWC, objects most strongly to the sneaky way in which this reactionary propaganda has been introduced into StWC publicity material.

            There is no "just cause" of Tibet against China. Tibet is not under "Chinese occupation" and even to imply the remotest similarity with the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq by Anglo-American imperialism, and zionist crimes against the Palestinian people, as the context of the StWC newsletter inevitably does, is to undermine the whole opposition to imperialism's wars of aggression. And it is those wars of aggression that StWC has the stated aim of opposing.

            Western imperialism, led first by Britain and then by the United States, has for over a century dreamt of splitting Tibet away from China, even more so after the Chinese revolution of 1949, in order to dominate the region and use it as a garrison from which to control both China and India.

            The Chinese hosting of the Olympic Games this year has been seized on by western imperialism and reactionaries of Tibetan descent for yet another effort to destabilise Tibet. Imperialism has instigated the riots that broke out in Tibet on 14 March, perpetrated by saboteurs and wreckers. Supposedly committed to non-violence hypocritically preached by the Dalai Llama, they attacked and set fire to schools, public buildings and shops owned by defenceless Chinese and muslims. On the first day they injured 623 people, including 241 police, and killed 18.

            The Tibetan popular masses do not support any attempts to force secession on Tibet; they want to remain part of China so that they can continue to enjoy ever improving living and cultural standards. They do not want to be plunged back into poverty and feudal domination for the benefit of imperialism.

            China has only used force in defence of the people of Tibet to counter the violence of the imperialist-backed wreckers and saboteurs.

            In this context it is completely reactionary to support any attempts to separate Tibet from China. We expect SWP to do so; it is part of its inability to take a thoroughgoing stand against imperialism and wholeheartedly call for its defeat. It is, however, completely out of order that StWC should distribute these pro- imperialist policies of the SWP in its newsletter.

            StWC should urgently and publicly retract, and renounce support for imperialism's predatory designs on Tibet.

           
Reply from Andrew Murray, National Chair, StWC
By email on 11 April 2008

            Thank you for your letter re Tibet. The text of which you complain was included in our newsletter in error. StWC has not discussed the issue of Tibet and we are not going to take a position on the matter since it does not form part of our objective of challenging the aggressive policies of the British and US governments in respect of the so-called "war on terror". There will be different views on Tibet among Coalition affiliates, but it is not something for the Coalition itself to get involved with.

            The appearance of the item in the newsletter was a political misjudgement which the officers of the Coalition had already addressed. In my view the original wording was aimed at exposing the hypocrisy of the British government but, nevertheless, the statements to which you object should never have appeared and will not be repeated.

           
CPGB-ML reply
By email on 12 April 2008

            Dear Andrew

            Thank you for your prompt reply, which is much appreciated.