The Dalai Lama starts an 11-day visit to France tomorrow that threatened to spark a crisis between Paris and Beijing, until French President Nicolas Sarkozy quashed speculation he would meet the Tibetan spiritual leader.
Planned more than two years ago, the Nobel peace laureate’s French visit turned suddenly political after a Chinese crackdown on unrest in Tibet in March that sparked international outrage in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics.
Sarkozy’s initial threat to boycott the Olympic opening ceremony, together with rowdy pro-Tibet protests during the passage of the Olympic flame through Paris, fuelled a months-long diplomatic spat with Beijing.
And a decision by the Paris city hall, which is held by the opposition, to name the 73-year-old spiritual leader an honorary citizen further fanned tensions.
Though Sarkozy decided last month to attend Friday’s opening, noting progress in talks between China and the Dalai Lama, he failed to prevent a wave of protests targeting French commercial interests in China.
Speculation over a meeting with the Buddhist leader in France since then continued to pour oil on the fire, with the Chinese ambassador in Paris warning of “serious consequences” for bilateral relations.
The French leader’s office finally announced on Wednesday that no meeting would take place, saying it was the Dalai Lama’s decision.
The Dalai Lama’s representative in France, Wangpo Bashi, said that the “timing is not right,” adding that a meeting during the Olympics risked setting back talks between Tibetan and Chinese parties.
Instead, Sarkozy’s wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy — who under French law has no official function — will attend the inauguration by the Dalai Lama of a temple in southern France on Aug. 22.
On Wednesday, the Buddhist leader is scheduled to meet some 250 senators and deputies from the French parliamentary group on Tibet, before holding talks with leaders of the French Tibetan community.
The rest of his stay from tomorrow to Aug. 23 will be devoted to religious visits, in the Paris region and elsewhere, and a six-day teaching cycle in the western city of Nantes.
“It is first and foremost a spiritual, religious visit,” said Bashi, who heads the Tibet Bureau in Paris. “That is how it was always intended.”
France is home to an estimated 770,000 Buddhists, according to the French Buddhist union, three-quarters of them of Asian origin. The Dalai Lama has visited France a dozen times since 1982, meeting with city or government officials and once with the president, the late Francois Mitterrand, in 1993.
France’s left-wing Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and junior minister for human rights Rama Yade have both said they would be willing to meet him, but no such plans have been announced.
Sarkozy has been accused at home of flip-flopping on the issue of the Olympics and undermining France’s credibility in China.
SUPPORT: Elon Musk’s backing for the far-right AfD is also an implicit rebuke of center-right Christian Democratic Union leader Friedrich Merz, who is leading polls German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took a swipe at Elon Musk over his political judgement, escalating a spat between the German government and the world’s richest person. Scholz, speaking to reporters in Berlin on Friday, was asked about a post Musk made on his X platform earlier the same day asserting that only the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party “can save Germany.” “We have freedom of speech, and that also applies to multi-billionaires,” Scholz said alongside Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal. “But freedom of speech also means that you can say things that are not right and do not contain
Ukraine’s military intelligence agency and the Pentagon on Monday said that some North Korean troops have been killed during combat against Ukrainian forces in Russia’s Kursk border region. Those are the first reported casualties since the US and Ukraine announced that North Korea had sent 10,000 to 12,000 troops to Russia to help it in the almost three-year war. Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said that about 30 North Korean troops were killed or wounded during a battle with the Ukrainian army at the weekend. The casualties occurred around three villages in Kursk, where Russia has for four months been trying to quash a
FREEDOM NO MORE: Today, protests in Macau are just a memory after Beijing launched measures over the past few years that chilled free speech A decade ago, the elegant cobblestone streets of Macau’s Tap Seac Square were jam-packed with people clamouring for change and government accountability — the high-water mark for the former Portuguese colony’s political awakening. Now as Macau prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of its handover to China tomorrow, the territory’s democracy movement is all but over and the protests of 2014 no more than a memory. “Macau’s civil society is relatively docile and obedient, that’s the truth,” said Au Kam-san (歐錦新), 67, a schoolteacher who became one of Macau’s longest-serving pro-democracy legislators. “But if that were totally true, we wouldn’t
TRUDEAU IN TROUBLE: US president-elect Donald Trump reacted to Chrystia Freeland’s departure, saying: ‘Her behavior was totally toxic, and not at all conducive to making deals Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland on Monday quit in a surprise move after disagreeing with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over US president-elect Donald Trump’s tariff threats. The resignation of Freeland, 56, who also stepped down as finance minister, marked the first open dissent against Trudeau from within his Cabinet, and could threaten his hold on power. Liberal leader Trudeau lags 20 points in polls behind his main rival, Conservative Pierre Poilievre, who has tried three times since September to topple the government and force a snap election. “It’s not been an easy day,” Trudeau said at a fundraiser Monday evening, but
RSS