WASHINGTON: China’s attempts to isolate the Dalai Lama will fail, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader’s special envoy said Friday after Beijing slammed a US plan to award him one of its top civilian honors.
“I think this is an effort by Congress to send a powerful message to the Chinese,” said Lodi Gyaltsen Gyari.
“China’s effort to isolate the Dalai Lama is not going to work.”
During the Dalai Lama’s visit to the United States October 15-19, he is to meet privately with President George W. Bush, who will also attend a public ceremony at which the Tibetan monk will receive the Congressional Gold Medal.
Though Bush has met privately before with the Dalai Lama, the Capitol Hill ceremony will mark the first time that a sitting US president appears with him in a public event, diplomats in Washington said.
Receiving the medal at a ceremony which Bush attends, despite Chinese fury over the issuing of the award, gives a boost to the Tibetan cause, the Tibetan envoy said.
“There is no doubt that this will give tremendous encouragement and hope” to the Tibetan struggle, he said.
The envoy said he also saw it as a “good omen” that the Dalai Lama’s meeting in Washington would coincide with the five-yearly Chinese 17th Communist Party Congress, which is to open Monday and last for about a week.
“It is our hope that more than ever before the leadership in Beijing will have an unfiltered, undiluted opportunity to hear the message of His Holiness.”
Beijing on Thursday blasted the US plan as an attempt to interfere in its business.
“China resolutely opposes the US Congress’s awarding of a so-called Congressional Gold Medal and firmly opposes any country and any person using the Dalai Lama issue to interfere in China’s internal affairs, ” foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said.
The encounter will mark the latest in a series of diplomatic rebuffs to Beijing’s efforts to isolate the 72-year-old Dalai Lama on the world stage.
The Dalai Lama, who won the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, was earlier this year named a distinguished professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia — the first time he has accepted a university appointment.
The Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959 and set up a Tibetan government in exile in Dharamsala, India after China crushed an uprising against its rule.
The Congressional Gold Medal is the highest civilian honor bestowed by Congress. Previous recipients include Sir Winston Churchill, Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa and former South African president Nelson Mandela.
