Apr
25
Unknow Story Behind Tibet
April 25, 2008 | 2 Comments
By Tia Tian Chi
It has been more than one month after the Tibetan unrest erupted at the “roof of the world” since the mid-March. With the two sets of propaganda machines, different kinds of news, stories, and analysis were produced and spread all over the world. Some of the basic facts become clear to most people simply with a little effort to read both sides: peaceful protests led by Tibetan monks began on March 10th; violence used by Tibetans against other ethnic Chinese broke out between 14th and 18th; buildings and vehicles burned, while people were injured, killed, or arrested.
But is what has happened simply caused by Tibetans calling for their independence, or was it ethnic tensions between Tibetans, Han Chinese, and Hui Muslim, or was it the “Dalai Lama Clique” that plotted and incited riot William Engdahl provided some behind-the-scenes information in his article “Why Washington Plays Roulette with China”, which is surely controversy but deserved much attention, since mainstream media tends to neglect these kind of news.
He pointed out right in the beginning that “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 relation and on the run-up to the Beijing Olympics.” He continued that “it’s part of an escalating strategy of destabilization of China which has been initiated by the Bush Administration over the past months, and which includes the attempt to ignite an anti-China Saffron Revolution in the neighboring Myanmar region, bring US-led NATO troops into Darfur where China’s oil companies are developing potentially huge oil reserves.”
What Engdahl said might sounds dramatic and implausible, but he doesn’t neglect evidences to back up the facts. The Dalai Lama fled out of Tibet with help from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1959 and “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.” The actors behind all the Tibet actions “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 Georage Soros through his daughter, Andrea Soros Colombel.”
The NED is a significant player here. The NED was founded under the Reagan administration in the early 1980’s, with the suggestion made by the director of the CIA at that time. It “was designed to pose as an independent NGO, one step removed from the CIA and Government agencies so as to be les conspicuous, presumably.” However, as its first president, Allen Weinstein commented on the Washington Post, “A lot of what we [the NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
With the helps, financially and diplomatically, of the NED, many pro-Dalai Lama Tibet independence organizations have kept running. For example, the International Campaign for Tibet was 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, founded of the NED.” Another US-based organization is Students for a Free Tibet, “founded in 1994 in New York City as a project of US Tibet Committee and the ICT. Other NED-financed entities includes the Tibet Times newspaper, the Tibet Multimedia center for “information dissemination that addresses the struggle for human rights and democracy in Tibet”, and the Tibetan Centre for Human rights and Democracy.
How much of William Engdahl’s research is reliable and trustworthy? It’s hard to tell. At least he provided alternative information other than that which is disseminated through the mainstream propaganda. In the end, it’s all up to the reader whom to believe.
2 Comments so far
Engdahl is a reasonably well-known propagandist with strong opinions, some interesting ideas, and very little real evidence. It’s important to have voices like his at the table. Not because he’s right — indeed, he is wrong much more often than he’s right — but because his claims compel others to find the real truth, which is neither as obvious as the media portrays it nor as insidious as Engdahl portrays it.