The Guardian 30 April, 2008
German role
in the anti-China campaign
Reports from a conference in Germany 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 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 the Canadian journalist, the 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. 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 more than the four preceding conferences: Coordinate the work of the international Tibet groups and consolidate the links between them with the central Tibetan Government in Exile;
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 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". 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".
The conference participants agreed to make the Olympics the single focus of attack for their activities for the next 15 months. They hired a full-time organiser, who has since been directing the worldwide campaign.
Paula Dobriansky, the Under-Secretary of State in the US State Department and special coordinator for Tibet questions also participated.
She was a member of the National Security Council 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.
The German media is using the uprisings as a backdrop to misrepresent actions by the Chinese security. Facts obviously play a subordinate role. In the meantime, television channels and daily journals have had to admit manipulations of images in the mass media. Film sequences with Nepalese policemen beating demonstrators were sold as documentation of alleged Chinese police attacks.
The security forces’ saving a boy from an attacking Tibetan mob was coarsely labelled a violent arrest. For the purpose of comparison go to german-foreign-policy.com documents, with excerpts of a CNN interview with a British journalist as well as the corresponding passage from a renowned German daily.