Spearheading pioneer in anti-China forces

Among the bewildering mass of the so-called human rights organizations, RSF has been playing an instrumental role in anti-China efforts. Logging onto the group's website, one will not miss the eye-catching symbol it fabricated to demonize China and Beijing Olympic Games – five linked black handcuffs with the caption "Beijing Olympics". It is evident that the group has put boycotting Beijing Olympics its top priority in the run-up to the Games.

Its despicable performance was highlighted at the Olympic flame lighting ceremony in Greece, where a RSF staff attempted to disturb the speech being delivered by a senior Beijing official by rushing to the forefront and unfolding a banner with the 'five linked handcuffs' intending to vilify China and 1.3 billion Chinese people. The poor show has been denounced in concert by the international community as a slur on Olympics and sports spirit, but it also incited the anti-China campaigns in some Western countries.

In the following days and along the route of Beijing Olympic torch relay, RSF members sowed and fueled hatred toward China and Chinese people anytime and anywhere using whatever ignoble ways they could conceive, even including delivering physical assaults to Chinese torch-bearers, as we have witnessed. On top of that, RSF has also exerted pressure on some Olympic sponsors calling for a boycott of the Beijing Games.

In November, 2007, on the eve of French President Nicolas Sarkozy's debut visit to China, RSF again put on its act imposing pressure upon Sorkozy and calling on him to "prompt China's government to improve its human rights." When the March 14 Lhasa bloody riots erupted, RSF immediately issued a statement launching a verbal attack on China, saying "we are appealing to the international authorities to express their denial to China's policies by proclaiming they have no intention to attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games."

Inside operations

A book entitled Menard's Archive published in Canada gives a detailed account about the operations inside RSF. The subject interviewed in the book is a Cuban dissident reporter, who had long been used by RSF as a shooter attacking Cuban government. In return, he was awarded a lap top, a mobile phone, as well as remuneration. But when Menard asked him to describe Fidel Castro as a "man-slaughter" in his article, the reporter declined saying in so doing, he could cause trouble to himself. Menard was, of course, unhappy with his attitude, and very soon replaced him with a new recruit.

What Menard wanted him to do, according to the Cuban reporter, was to encroach the bottom line of Cuba's law, incurring a possible arrest, which would be easily used to accuse Cuba of political persecution of its reporters by RSF.

The above is not a matter of chance because it turns out that RSF is on the payroll of the US State Department and has close ties to Helms-Burton-funded Cuban exile groups. As a majority of members of the US Congress work toward normalizing trade and travel relations with Cuba, the extremist anti-Castro groups that have dictated US Cuba policy for 40 years continue working tirelessly to maintain an economic stranglehold on Cuba. Their support for RSF is part of the overall strategy.

Jean-Guy Allard, a journalist with Granma International, wrote a book about RSF's leader Robert Menard, laying out the true pieces of the puzzle regarding Menard's activities, associations and sources of funding in an attempt to explain what he calls Menard's "obsession" with Cuba. It is true that Menard has many big-cash sponsors in Europe and the US, in addition to the Center for a Free Cuba (CFC), as a RSF member said on condition of anonymity that RSF's US$50,000 payments from the CFC and a January grant of US$40,000 from the National Endowment for Democracy only constitute a fraction of the organization's budget.

Feeding off its sponsors, RSF has to show adequate loyalty and obedience to them and working as an agent on behalf of its sponsors' interests.

(China Daily via Global Times July 3, 2008)