April 14, 2008 - No. 55
Risky Geopolitical Game:
Washington Plays 'Tibet Roulette' with China
- F. William Engdahl, Global Research,
April 10, 2008 -
• Risky
Geopolitical Game: Washington Plays
'Tibet Roulette' with China - F. William Engdahl, Global
Research
• The Olympic Torch Relay Campaign -
wwww.german-foreign-policy.com
• Reflections by Comrade Fidel Castro: The
Chinese Victory
SUPPLEMENT
• China Daily Online -- Commentaries and News
Analysis
Risky Geopolitical Game: Washington Plays
'Tibet Roulette' with China
- F. William Engdahl, Global Research,
April 10, 2008 -
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
destabilization 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 neighboring Myanmar
region, bringing U.S.-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 U.S. 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
U.S. 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-U.S. 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 U.S.
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 Color 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 U.S. 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 1930's 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 U.S. 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 U.S.-based American
Society for a Free Asia, a CIA front, publicized 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 U.S. 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 organization, funded by the U.S. Congress,
the National Endowment for Democracy
(NED). The NED has been instrumental in every U.S.-backed Color
Revolution destabilization from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine to
Myanmar. Its funds go to back opposition media and global public
relations campaigns to popularize their pet opposition candidates.
As in the other recent Color Revolutions, the U.S.
Government is fanning the flames of destabilization against China by
funding opposition protest organizations inside and outside Tibet
through its arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
The NED was founded by the Reagan Administration in the
early 1980's, 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 destabilizations 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 privatized U.S. 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
organization 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 U.S. State Department
officials including Gare Smith and Julia Taft.[8]
Another especially active anti-Beijing organization is
the U.S.-based Students for a Free Tibet, founded in 1994 in New York
City as a project of U.S. 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 organizations 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
organization whose main funding
is from the NED.[9]
Among related projects, the U.S. 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 Center for "information dissemination that addresses the
struggle for human rights and democracy
in Tibet," also based in Dharamsala. And NED finances the Tibetan
Center for Human Rights and Democracy.
In short, U.S. State Department and U.S. 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
U.S.$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 destabilize 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 U.S.
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 organizations. 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
destabilization effort on the part of Washington. What few people
realize 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, specializes in
"nonviolence as a form of warfare."[12]
Colonel Helvey was formerly with the Defense
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 U.S. Pentagon has refined an entirely new form of regime
change and political destabilization. As one researcher of the
phenomenon behind the wave of color 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 U.S.
military and National Security Agency subsidized 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 U.S. 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 1970's 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 destabilization attempt by Washington using Tibet,
no doubt with quiet "help" from its friends in British and other
U.S.-friendly intelligence services, is part of a clear pattern.
It includes Washington's "Saffron revolution" attempts
to destabilize 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 U.S.-led bombing
of former Yugoslavia and the U.S. 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 U.S. missiles on Russia's doorstep "to defend against
threat of Iranian nuclear attack on the United States."
The U.S.-led destabilization in Tibet is part of a
strategic shift of great significance. It comes at a time when the U.S.
economy and the U.S. dollar, still the world's reserve currency, are in
the worst crisis since the 1930's. It is significant that the U.S.
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 U.S. 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 U.S. debt on the market.
Endnotes
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. U.S. 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.
The Olympic Torch Relay Campaign
- wwww.german-foreign-policy.com, April
8, 2008 -
Conference reports and the research of a Canadian
journalist reveal that a German Foreign Ministry front organization 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 organizing worldwide "protests" at a
conference organized 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 U.S. 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 organized 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] -- "coordinate 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 organizer 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 organized 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 organization (Friedrich
Naumann Foundation) and a high-ranking representative of the U.S. 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 labeled 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.
Notes
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
Reflections by Comrade Fidel Castro
The Chinese Victory
- March 31, 2008 (extracts) -
[...] The works of prestigious U.S. 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
recognized 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 U.S. 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 U.S. Congress' Gold
Medal, praised George W. Bush for his efforts in defense 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
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