Newspapers and ministers that are encouraging mass migration into Britain and free movement of labour across the EU are lining up to back the Dalai Lama and the idea that Tibet must remain racially pure Tibetan...
They say they want freedom for Tibet, but what they want is to break up China
WORKERS, MAY 2008 ISSUE
What are we to make of the protests against the Olympic torch relay combined with calls to 'Free Tibet'? Let's start with the US award to the Dalai Lama of the Congressional Gold Medal in October 2007.
This award in Washington came at the end of a tour of western capitals during which the Dalai Lama's status was elevated to that of a head of state. This, by the way, was the same medal that was awarded to Tony Blair for his loyal service to the US over the invasion of Iraq, but unlike the Dalai Lama, Blair never dared to go to Washington to receive the medal because of the outrage that it would cause back home in Britain.
So why was the Dalai Lama awarded the medal? He is not an elected leader, but he claims to be a reincarnation, a God king. So it could not be for services to democracy. Perhaps, like Blair, it was for services to the USA.
At the award ceremony, the Dalai Lama condemned "Chinese immigration into Tibet that is destroying its culture", although the last census identified only 2.5 per cent of the population of Tibet as non Tibetan. Had he made similar remarks in Britain about how immigration was destroying British culture, he would have been condemned as racist and maybe prosecuted.
Race riots
We then hear about ethnic Tibetans rioting and killing Chinese-speaking residents, coinciding with the beginning of the Olympic Games torch relay. Again, if this had happened in Britain, it would have been called a race riot and the government would have cracked down hard.
China is building capitalism and as in any other industrial revolution, it has brought hardship and suffering to its burgeoning working class. This is something for the Chinese working class to deal with, as we did in Britain, by struggle and building working class organisations such as trade unions. But it is generally recognised that China will soon overtake the US and EU to become the dominant capitalist power in the world.
It is this that is at the heart of the US/EU inspired attempts to damage the Beijing Olympic Games and in the longer term break up China by supporting secessionist movements in the Chinese provinces of Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, all inalienably part of a sovereign China.
Drive to break up countries
This is nothing new: the same US/EU axis has broken up other countries such as Yugoslavia and the USSR in order to achieve dominance and they are currently trying to cause the breakaway of resource rich provinces in Venezuela and Bolivia. No surprise, then, that Tibet is rich in gold, uranium and timber. We are also seeing the US/EU expanding eastwards through NATO's swallowing not just of Croatia and Albania, but Ukraine and Georgia, thus seeking to control the Black Sea. This is the advance of an empire seeing competition from a re-emergent Russia and particularly a rapidly growing China.
The media also has its role in the plan, reporting only on the Chinese crackdown in Tibet and providing continuous live TV coverage of the anti Chinese actions while eyewitness accounts from journalists such as James Miles (The Economist) are smothered. He reported "pogrom-like attacks by Tibetan gangs on non Tibetan members of the population including the Muslim minority. Shops of Tibetan merchants were marked and left unscathed whilst those of non Tibetans were plundered, destroyed and set alight." In one building alone, five textile saleswomen were burnt to death and a Canadian tourist described how a young non-Tibetan motorcyclist was 'mercilessly' beaten to death by a Tibetan gang.
So we have a political campaign of interference, based in the US, in the internal affairs of a sovereign country combining a rag bag of villains including the US State Department, the German and other EU governments, Richard Gere and his Hollywood pals, those closely linked to the CIA, and those wanting a return to feudalism and slavery in Tibet while monks practise mumbo jumbo and contribute nothing to society. Their foot soldiers here are those British "liberals" who probably think that anyone in the world has a right to come and live in Britain while Tibet must remain racially pure Tibetan and who almost certainly support the free movement of labour in the EU but not, of course, in China.
There is a long history of attempts by British and other outside forces to split Tibet away from China. In the eighteenth century, the Chinese had set up a protectorate over Tibet, which culminated in the constitutional revolution of 1750, when the last Tibetan lay rulers were removed. The British government recognised Chinese sovereignty over Tibet in 1792, and again in the Anglo-Chinese Conventions of 1876, 1890 and 1906 and in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. But this did not stop them from attacking Tibet from India in 1904, trying to split Tibet from China to use it as a base from which to put pressure on Russia. In 1911, British forces again invaded Tibet, to crush a Chinese nationalist army there.
Virtually every other country in the world has long recognised Tibet as part of China. In 1943 the United States government formally reaffirmed that it had never raised a question regarding China's claim that Tibet was part of China. In 1949 and again in 1950 the United Nations refused to accept a claim by certain Tibetans that Tibet should be recognised as an independent nation and rejected their demand that the UN condemn "Chinese aggression".
In 1951 the People's Republic of China re-affirmed Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. In May 1951, the Dalai Lama's court signed a 17-Point Agreement with China acknowledging China's sovereignty over Tibet. Subsequently, China tried to turn Tibet's traditional theocracy into agents of gradual modernisation. But Tibet's feudal land-owning class, living off the serfdom of 95 per cent of the population, resisted all attempts at reform.
In 1958, some Khamba tribesmen, supported, directed and armed by the CIA, revolted against the government. In 1959, the CIA organised the Dalai Lama's departure to India. CIA planes flew air cover for the Dalai Lama's party hundreds of miles inside Tibet and strafed Chinese forces. The Dalai Lama's court then unilaterally abrogated the 1951 Agreement, leaving the PRC with no option but to quell the uprising. Ever since, the Dalai Lama has refused to recognise China's sovereignty over Tibet. The PRC has worked to improve people's living conditions and to integrate Tibet into the mainstream of modern Chinese life. It rightly rejects attempts by outsiders to interfere in its internal affairs, to de-stabilise China and force it back to its old condition of being split into warring states.
The principle of sovereignty
The principle here is the same one that applies to British workers in relation to the EU and the attempted break up of Britain – national sovereignty. The principle of national sovereignty has applied since the creation of the United Nations at the end of the Second World War. A nation's borders are inviolate and interference in the internal affairs of other nations is wrong.
This did not stop war in Vietnam or the overthrow of Latin American governments by the United States, but because of the existence of the USSR the principle more or less held. This was ended by the invasion of Iraq and Blair's doctrine of "liberal interventionism" which has now been elevated to a strategy by the US and the EU. It is this new neo con philosophy that is now being used to justify intervention in Chinese internal matters.
For us the argument is plain. Defend British national sovereignty against control by the EU or the US; defend the sovereignty of our class. Support others who defend their national sovereignty and oppose Blair's philosophy of interventionism. Who knows, what western capitalism may be scared of is that one day a mighty Chinese working class will rise up and re-take control of what may become the richest and most powerful country in the world.
Dark tale of Germany, Brussels and links to the CIA... The secessionist riots in Tibet were to be the starting point of a campaign devised at a conference held in Brussels in May 2007. They were to be followed by other Tibetan riots in Nepal and India and then the torch lighting ceremony in Olympia, Greece, when some "demonstrators" unfurled a "free Tibet" banner.
These "demonstrators" were in fact from Reporters sans Frontieres, an organisation exposed by Canadian journalist Jean-Guy Allard as being part financed by the US National Endowment for Democracy and with ties to admitted CIA agents. Unesco recently distanced itself from RsF on Internet Freedom Day because of its lack of ethics.
The Brussels conference was attended by Paula Dobriansky, the Undersecretary of State in the US State Department and the head of the Tibetan "government" in exile. It was hosted by a German Foreign Ministry front organisation, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, and supported by a small number of Hollywood celebrities. According to the plans devised by the conference, the anti-Chinese campaign will continue until the Olympics itself when it is intended to demonstrate daily in the centre of Beijing.