Soon after organised violence began in Tibet on 14 March 2008, the 49th anniversary of the March 1959 uprising, intelligence experts observed that the evidence suggested that the Lhasa uprising was “pre-planned and well orchestrated.” The riots were clearly timed to embarrass China on the eve of the Olympic torch relays preceding the August 2008 Games in Beijing.
Experts view the current unrest as part of a Western design to destabilize China by fomenting trouble in Tibet, Xingjian-Uighur and Inner Mongolia. China is a fast-growing economy that challenges the West in Africa, the Gulf and other resource-rich regions like Myanmar. The emerging China-Russia axis (exemplified by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) further threatens Western economic supremacy, and the close participation of a recalcitrant Iran in this group is another irritant.
China, like Russia, has refused to recognize the ‘independence’ of Kosovo, which is under virtual NATO occupation. US President George Bush’s decision to continue the process of incorporating Ukraine into NATO, despite the opposition of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, would have been noticed in Beijing and Moscow.
An “independent” Tibet, like Kosovo, would in reality be little more than an American military base against China, India and Russia. Kenneth Conboy, Heritage Foundation, and James Morrison, Army trainer for the CIA, have in their book, The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet (Kansas University Press, 2002) documented how the bloody revolt of 1959 was fully planned and financed by the CIA to undermine China.
The current Lhasa protests are similarly tainted by close affinity with foreign powers keen to gain access to the roof of the world. Despite intense propaganda by foreign intelligence, foreign media, and the government-in-exile in Dharamsala and its US-funded Radio Free Asia, the protests do not appear to be a mass uprising against Chinese rule. By all accounts, the violence was instigated by 300 monks from Drepung monastery, who synchronized their moves with unrest in neighbouring Gansu, Sichuan and Qinghai, and an aborted march to Tibet by monks in India and Nepal. The violence was savage enough (at least one man was burnt alive) to embarrass the Dalai Lama who threatened to resign until certain pressures caused him to change his tune and talk of “cultural genocide” and an international enquiry into events in the Himalayan state.
The CIA has a continuing relationship with the Dalai Lama and the Free Tibet Movement. Washington’s covert operations against China began in 1956 and resulted in the 1959 uprising which led to the death of several thousand Tibetans and the flight of the Dalai Lama and one lakh followers to India and Nepal. Many Tibetan NGOs are funded by the West, and have a history of violence. This near-identification of the movement with the Tibetan Diaspora and its western backers has cost it credibility in capitals like Moscow, Myanmar, Kathmandu and New Delhi.
According to intelligence and security expert Richard M. Bennett, the CIA set up a secret military training camp for the Dalai Lama’s followers at Camp Hale near Leadville, Colorado, USA. These US-trained Tibetan guerrillas carried out regular raids in Tibet, with the help of CIA-contract mercenaries and CIA planes. The Colorado camp operated till at least 1966. The CIA Tibetan Task Force, simultaneously created by Roger E McCarthy, also engaged Chinese forces in Tibet up to 1974. In the mid-1960s, CIA dropped the practice of parachuting guerrilla fighters and intelligence agents into Tibet and opted to create a guerrilla army, the Chusi Gangdruk. Beijing managed to pressurize Nepal to close the base there in 1974.
Washington’s support to Tibet waned with the opening to China by US President Richard Nixon in February 1972. But the links were kept open and it is believed the CIA was involved in a failed revolt in October 1987. Currently, China is in troubled waters, with the Uighur Muslim unrest in Xinjiang; the Falun Gong and other dissident groups in mainland China, and the security of the Summer Olympics. As China threatens American supremacy in Asia, Africa and Latin America, this is probably the best time to get even.
Richard M. Bennett feels that unless the disturbances develop into a general uprising against the Han Chinese, the large quantities of arms and explosives smuggled into Tibet over the past three decades will remain safely hidden. Beijing nowadays is making discoveries and seizures of weapons from some monasteries. Bennett says these weapons were acquired in the international arms bazaar and their markings wiped out.
Andrei Areshev also feels the Lhasa events have a geopolitical significance connected to China and America challenging each other in Africa, Latin America, Myanmar, Central Asia, the Gulf and even Pakistan. Washington is keen to deny Beijing access to energy security from oil and gas-rich nations. Areshev feels the Dalai Lama, who accepted the Gold Medal of U.S. Congress in October 2007, will help Washington prepare the ground for a dramatization of the Tibet issue. He has already called for an international inquiry into China’s crackdown; the next step would be international intervention, Kosovo-style.
Washington’s conflict with China has sharply increased in the context of the global competition for resources. The Tibet Autonomous Region today has one of the largest lithium reserves in the world, the Chabyer salt lake. China is the largest producer and consumer of lithium-ion batteries, on which a range of high-end technology relies, such as laptop computers, electronic devices like iPods, and lithium batteries which power laptops and other items. Emerging electric, hybrid, and plug-in hybrid vehicles are being developed with lithium for clean energy storage.
Washington is desperately trying to draw India into its anti-China orbit, and New Delhi has been wise to resist this pressure. It cannot be in our interests to extend American military presence from the Gulf, Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, right up to Tibet.
Organiser weekly, 6 April 2008