Profile

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a U.S. non-profit soft power organisation established during the Reagan Administration whose founding objective is to promote democracy around the world through the strengthening of the system of a free press, unions, political parties, and educational establishments. Although administered as a private organisation, its funding mostly comes from a governmental appropriation by the U.S. Congress.

The work of NED is closely linked to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Allen Weinstein, NED’s first acting president, stated that “A lot of what we [the NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”. By building on the pioneering work of liberal “philanthropists” such as the Rockefeller Foundation in co-opting progressive social movements, NED seems to have been envisaged by U.S. foreign policy elites as a more effective way to provide strategic funding to NGOs than via covert CIA funding.

In practice, it has been noted that NED has in fact subverted democracy in many places by selectively funding media organisations and showering funding on foreign political parties or movements in order to secure American interests overseas. Examples include the underwriting of various overseas “colour revolutions” in the guise of genuine indigenous democratic movements. In 2015 Russia’s government strengthened regulations seeking to ban “undesirable” groups. The first to be thrown out of the country in this way was NED.

As regards the Himalayas, the U.S. commenced its influential role in the region by supporting the Tibetan resistance of the 1950s and '60s, after Communist China occupied the Tibetan plateau. The CIA provided military training and intervention, arms, money, and air support. For much of the 1960s, the CIA provided the Tibetan exile movement with U.S. $1.7 million a year for operations against China, including an annual subsidy of U.S. $180,000 for the Dalai Lama. While the funds were paid to him personally, he used all or most of them for activities of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

In the 1970s, after the normalisation of relations between the U.S. and China and the collapse of the resistance movement, the U.S. cast its relationship with the Dalai Lama and his people in terms of a contest between human rights and political engagement with China. In 1979 the Dalai Lama visited the U.S. and the Tibetan cause found new sponsors in a bipartisan group of senators, members of Congress, and congressional staff assistants who worked with the Dalai Lama’s entourage to focus attention of successive U.S. administrations and the world community on the Tibetan situation.

From the 1980s onward, through the work of NED, other federal organisations and NGOs, the U.S. has supported the movements for Tibetan independence and human rights within exiled Tibetan communities in India and Nepal. NED has provided funding for numerous organisations and institutions in connection with these causes.

The International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), founded in 1988, is a non-profit organisation with offices in the U.S. and Europe. ICT has received ongoing financial support from NED in the form of grants to influence opinion within China and abroad on Tibetan issues, and bring together Chinese journalists and pro-democracy leaders with influential Tibetans in exile. Past ICT directors include Gare Smith (previously deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor), and Julia Taft (previously U.S. Assistant Secretary of State and Special Coordinator for Tibetan Issues).

Another recipient of NED grants has been the Tibet Fund (not to be confused with the Chinese GONGO, the Tibet Development Fund), which in the 1990s produced audio materials for rural communities in Tibet, as well as Tibetan exile communities in India and Nepal, to expose them to world and Tibetan news. The Tibet Fund also received NED aid for educational work in Dharamsala, India, to raise social and political awareness among Tibetans, emphasising speeches by the Dalai Lama on democracy and human rights. Also included in the scope of the funded work was the organisation dialogues between exile Tibetans and Indian youth to increase support for the Tibetan cause in India. The Tibet Fund also received NED aid to produce a Chinese language news magazine about Tibet

Other groups that received NED backing include the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, the London-based Tibet Information Network (TIN) which operated from the late 1980s until 2005, and media such as the Tibet Times, the Tibetan Review, the Voice of Tibet shortwave radio station, and the Tibet Multimedia Center, which published a magazine to educate the Chinese public about Tibetans’ struggle for human rights.

In 2010, the Dalai Lama came to Washington, D.C. to receive the Democracy Service Medal from NED President Carl Gershman. The award was seen in retrospect as a symbolic pre-retirement ceremony for the Dalai Lama, who one year later would abdicate his temporal leadership of the Tibetan Exile administration and his role as political ruler of the Tibetan people. For further details, see our analysis of the geopolitics of the Tibetan Exile Administration. 

As of 2016 the Indian government placed NED, as well the Open Society Foundations of billionaire globalist financier George Soros on a watch list, meaning that donors can no longer send money directly to these outfits in India without prior clearance from the Home Ministry. 

Notable Officials

• Carl Gershman, President
• Tilak Pathak, Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow
• Wilson Lee, Program Officer, NED South-Asian Desk