Honoring the Dalai Lama

(International Herald Tribune editorial published Oct. 18)


It is a given that whenever the Dalai Lama is honored in the West, China's Communist leaders lash out in fury. It happened when the Tibetan spiritual leader was received by German Chancellor Angela Merkel last month, and it happened again this week when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and was received by President George W. Bush. It is our hope that free nations will continue to defy China's faux indignation, and that by honoring the Dalai Lama they will add to pressures on Beijing to open serious talks about granting Tibet the autonomy he seeks for his people.

Since he fled Tibet, when China crushed an uprising there in 1959, the Dalai Lama, who is venerated as the 14th reincarnation of the spiritual leader of Tibet, has remained a powerful symbol of Tibet's resistance to China's suppression of its unique culture. In Beijing-speak, the Dalai Lama is a "splittist," someone out to split off a chunk of China. Zhang Qingli, the Chinese party boss in Tibet, denounced the Dalai Lama before the Communist Party's current National Congress as "a person who basely splits his motherland and doesn't even love his motherland."

The fact is that the Dalai Lama does love his motherland - Tibet - and is not trying to split it away from China. In intermittent talks with the Chinese, his envoys have made clear that they do not seek sovereignty, but rather a measure of cultural and religious autonomy.

We would like to think that the 72-year-old spiritual leader's life-long dedication to nonviolence, kindness, and tolerance might rub off on some of the people he meets in Washington. "Through violence, you may solve one problem, but you sow the seeds for another," is one of his statements that politicians in Washington might meditate upon. Or this: "The world has become so small that no nation can solve its problems alone, in isolation from others."

There's no reason to believe that Beijing would really imperil its relations with the United States or Europe over the Dalai Lama. In any case, China's new-found wealth is no reason to abet its colonization of Tibet. On the contrary, that wealth should give China's leaders the self-confidence and maturity to respect and encourage the uniqueness of this ancient land and the wisdom of its spiritual ruler.