TIBET AND CHINA: II C.I.A. INVOLVEMENT THREAT TO CHINESE SOVEREIGNTY

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33434, 16 January 1974, Page 12

TIBET AND CHINA: II C.I.A. INVOLVEMENT THREAT TO CHINESE SOVEREIGNTY

(By T. D. ALLMAN, in the "Guardian" ) (Reprinted by arrangement) “As Cold War prejudices fade," a Tibetan scholar recently wrote, “it becomes clear that the events overtaking Tibet in the 1950 s and 1960 s were not simply a case of a strong Chinese Government reasserting control over a region of outer China its weaker predecessor had ignored."

Nor — judging from documentary evidence, the accounts of Tibetan exiles, and reports coming from Tibet — were the various Tibetan crises the product, as was believed at the time, of some sinister Communist plot to extinguish Tibetan “freedom.” Instead, Communist China initially granted Tibet a degree of autonomy that was completely expedient and non-doctrinaire. But this autonomy was exploited both

Iby conservative factions I inside Tibet and by the C.I.A. which became deeply and directly involved in internal Tibetan affairs from bases in India. Eventually the threat to Chinese sovereignty, as perceived in Peking, became intolerable.

The result, on the surface, was one of China’s greatest cold war propaganda defeats, as units of the Red Army crushed a Tibetan uprising in 1959, and later confronted the Indian Army along the disputed Macmahon Line. Those events, at the time, were almost universally interpreted outside China as a clear-cut case of Communist aggression. Out of the passage of time, and a series of recent interviews with people directly involved in those events, however, other facts emerge. Ageement signed The facts, essentially, are these. In 1951, the Communists re-estabilshed Chinese sovereignty over Tibet for the first time since 1912, when the Manchu garrison had been driven from Lhasa.

An agreement was signed by which the Dalai Lama’s court accepted Chinese suzerainty. But the spiritual, and most of the temporal powers, of the Dalai Lama remained intact. No Chinese effort was made to interfere with the internal life of Tibet.

While the events of 1951 were pictured in the West as a Communist “conquest,” Chinese troops did not in fact enter Lhasa. Indeed, the Chinese reestablished their indirect — and as events would show, extremely tenuous — influence over Tibet through means similar to those used by Britain to achieve similar ends in 1904. Threats of violence were combined with promises of progress, but whereas the Chinese stopped short of Lhasa, the British Younghusband expedition had entered the city, and dictated terms to the Tibetans. From 1952 until 1959, the Chinese, according to people in Lhasa at the time, attempted to turn the traditional theocracy — ’ notably the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama —into agents of gradual modernisation in Tibet. Even the most restrained Chinese efforts, however, inevitably incurred the resentment of Tibet’s feudal elite. A major problem was that the Dalai Lama, bom in 1937, was still an adolescent during the most crucial phases of the Tibetan-Chinese confrontation. “The Dalai Lama was used as the tool of the aristocracy,” one non-Communist source recently said. “He intelligent leadership.” The uses to which the Dalai Lama could be put were first demonstrated in 1956 when the Dalai Lama, then 19, was removed by his court to India, against Chinese wishes.

Reforms desired There followed protracted negotiations by which fundamental reforms in Tibet were bargained against the return of the Dalai Lama to Lhasa. Those surrounding the Dalai Lama wished to avoid all reforms. The Chinese — and many Tibetans — wanted fundamental changes. Eventually, Chou En-lai visited India to negotiate with the Lamaist court. And when, from Peking, Mao Tsetung took the unprecedented step, for a revolutionary leader, of publicly pledging to delay reforms indefinitely, the Dalai Lama and his entourage returned to Lhasa. By that time, however, both India and more importantly the United States had entered the Tibetan equilibrium. In 1958, Khamba tribesmen rose up in revolt in south-eastern Tibet. The Khambas—it now is Known —were supported, directed and supplied by C.I.A. agents working from “forward area bases” in north-east India.

The United States policy, according to one of the Americans involved, was part of a co-ordinated effort “to

I incite turmoil in all rear 'areas of China." The hope was that such activities i “would check Chinese aggression by giving them so much j trouble at home.” Before 1959 the Chinese in Tibet made no effort to re- | strict the use of private fire-

arms and armies, or to limit Tibetan trade with Nepal and India. But as the Khamba C.I.A. insurgency gained force, the Chinese initiated a counter-offensive. For the first time, Red Army units were sent to fight in tribal areas, and anti-Chinese Tibetan leaders were arrested. Restrictions on the movement of firearms, trade, and populations were also imposed. According to sources in Lhasa at the time, it was in early 1959, when the Chinese were beginning to restore order, that the Dalai Lama, still only 22, was moved by his court into insurgent territory, and then to India. 'There, with Indian and United States encouragement, [his court abrogated the 1951 agreements with China.

“Escape” planned The “escape” of the Dalai Lama and his court was [widely reported, and the I image of a Red Army ruthlessly driving a venerated Buddhist leader from his homeland is still vivid in the

popular mind. The facts, however, wen different. According to sources with first-hand knowledge the Dalai Lama’s departure was engineered by the C.I.A American aircraft flew air cover for the Dalai Lama’s party hundreds of miles inside Tibet parachuting supplies, radios, and money, and strafing Chinese positions. The apparent Chinese hope was that, in 1959 as in 1956. the Dalai Lama could eventually be persuaded to return to Tibet. Nowhere in his published works does the Dalai Lama himself accuse the Chinese of harming him, or threatening him. And for five years after his departure the Chinese continued to regard the Dalai Lama both as the spiritual leader of Tibet, and as chairman of the preparatory committee. The events in Tibet since 1959 are one of the most important, if least appreciated, examples of the misuses to which remote peoples were put during the most obsessively anti-Communist phase of the cold war. Chinese offer Another American authority said: "The Dalai Lama was terribly misused, not just by his own court, but by the C.1.A." An Indian diplomat concurred. “In all objectivity,” he said, “it is undeniable that the Chinese in 1951 offered Tibet a far greater measure of self-deter-mination than democratic India was willing to grant to Kashmir or Hyderabad.” The Dalai Lama has lately limited his criticisms of the Chinese, and expressed the hope that eventually he will be permitted to return to a Tibet enjoying a greater of autonomy within [the People’s Republic of China. The governing irony of Tibet’s present status, however, is that China offered such an accommodation 22 years ago — and it was systematically subverted not just by what the Chinese Communists called “reactionary elements" inside Tibet but also by countries like the United States that now appreciate the importance of a stable China with stable frontiers. “Even Chiang Kai-shek regarded Tibet as an internal Chinese matter,” concluded one visitor to Lhasa. “The tragedy is that if the C.I.A had not forced the Chinese hand, the Dalai Lama might still be the leader of Tibet, and many reforms have beer postponed indefinitely.’’ (Concluded.)