The Dalai Lama was due to arrive in Germany yesterday at the start of a tour of Western powers, two months after China’s crackdown on violence in Lhasa sparked international condemnation.
The visit will keep the issue of Tibet center-stage until the Olympic Games start in Beijing in August. After Germany the Tibetan spiritual leader will also visit the US, Australia, Britain and France.
The Tibetan government-in-exile based in Dharamsala in India, where the Dalai Lama fled in 1959, says 203 Tibetans were killed and 1,000 injured in Beijing’s crackdown following anti-Chinese riots in March in Tibet.
Beijing says Tibetan “rioters” and “insurgents” killed 21 people and accuses the Dalai Lama of being behind the violence and of fomenting trouble ahead of the Olympics — an allegation rejected by the Buddhist cleric.
This month representatives of the Dalai Lama held talks with China to try to defuse tensions.
In Germany, the Nobel peace laureate’s schedule has raised eyebrows as he will be meeting neither German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is in Latin America, nor Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
When the Dalai Lama last came to Germany in September last year, a meeting with Merkel at the chancellery caused a deep chill in relations betweeen Berlin and Beijing which only recently began to thaw.
A government spokesman denied that his schedule this time meant that Berlin was giving in to diplomatic pressure from China — a key market for German firms like Volkswagen, Siemens and Bayer.
The Dalai Lama’s representative in Europe, Tseten Chhoekyap, branded Steinmeier’s decision not to meet the Dalai Lama “an unhappy one,” but his spokesman Tenzin Takla later downplayed the statement.
“His Holiness does not wish to create any inconvenience for anyone or any country,” Takla said in Dharamsala.
In place of Merkel or Steinmeier, Berlin has designated Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul to meet the Dalai Lama on behalf of the government on Monday.
He was also due to hold talks with the speaker of parliament Norbert Lammert and the state premiers of Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia, Roland Koch and Juergen Ruettgers, and to address the foreign affairs committee of parliament.
The chairman of the committee, Ruprecht Polenz, told the Muenstersche Zeitung regional daily yesterday that the Chinese embassy in Berlin had urged it to cancel the meeting, but that the committee had declined. While in Germany the Dalai Lama will also give talks on human rights, religion and globalization in Bochum, Moenchengladbach and Nuremberg.
The second leg of the five-nation trip will take the 72-year-old to Britain for nine days, where he will hold talks with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Brown drew fire on Wednesday after it emerged that he would not meet the Tibetan spiritual leader on May 23 in his Downing Street office, as his predecessors Tony Blair and John Major had done.
The head of an all-party committee said the decision to meet at Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s residence, appeared to be designed to allay Chinese anger at the talks by presenting them as not entirely formal.
“It is deeply disappointing to us that the prime minister appears to be willing to kowtow to the Chinese leadership,” Norman Baker said.
But Brown said the location of the talks was not as important as the substance.
“What matters is not what part of [London] we meet but what issues we discuss about Tibet,” he said in parliament.
“All issues of substance relating to our views of what’s happening in Tibet will be discussed ... and we will be pressing the Dalai Lama to join us in facilitating negotiations between the Chinese government and the Tibetans,” he said.
The Dalai Lama was also due to give “evidence” on human rights issues to British parliament’s foreign affairs committee, his spokesman said, and will also give talks in London, Oxford and Nottingham.
The Dalai Lama returns to India on June 1 and after a brief pause will leave for Australia, the US and France, wrapping up the tour on Aug. 20 — just four days before the Olympics close.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS