By Phurbu Thinley
Dharamsala, Feb 22: Exiled Tibetan leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama says “censorship” in China is the source of Tibet’s problems with China’s Communist rulers.
Speaking to the Reuters news agency on a visit to Beverly Hills in California, the Dalai Lama said the Chinese people have no opportunity to understand the position of Tibetans due to restriction placed on the free flow of information by the Chinese government.
“Censorship … is the source of the problem,” the Dalai Lama said in the interview on Saturday.
“The Chinese people have no opportunity to know our issue,” His Holiness added.
The Tibetan leader said this has enabled Chinese authorities to portray him as a demon and a terrorist.
“Do I look like a demon?” the winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize joked, holding his fingers beside his head to make devil horns.
The Dalai Lama advocates Tibet having meaningful autonomy within the People’s Republic of China. Beijing, however, routinely vilifies him as being a “dangerous separatist”.
His Holiness said the United States and other countries could help his campaign for a free Tibet by promoting an open society in China.
“Once China becomes an open society — freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of information — all this unnecessary fear and doubt will reduce,” he said. “That’s the real answer for this problem.
The Dalai Lama, who arrived in Los Angeles on Friday to lend his support to Whole Child International, a nonprofit organization that works on behalf of orphaned and abandoned children, said Western search engines like Google Inc were important to the free flow of information within China. He noted they had ceded to pressure from the Communist government there to limit what users can see.
Google last month threatened to pull out of China if the government did not agree to stop censoring its Chinese-language service.
In a separate interview with Los Angeles Times on Saturday, the Tibetan leader said that he is, however, encouraged by what he sees as growing support for the Tibetan cause among Chinese intellectuals, although he said the Chinese government remains “hardened” against him.
In the interview, he said that there had been no progress in the latest round of talks with China over his call for greater autonomy in Tibet. “No progress…… Always the Chinese authorities [are] very hardened. Not only [against] Tibetans, but also… toward their own people,” the exiled Tibetan eader told the LA Times when asked if he saw any progress on the Tibet issue.
Still, he said he found some reasons to cling to hope that the standoff could ease. “The number of Chinese intellectuals and writers [coming] out, they openly support our middle way approach and [are] very critical of their own government policy,” the Dalai Lama said.
The Dalai Lama claimed that Chinese intellectuals had become more sympathetic to Tibet as a result of pro-autonomy demonstrations in 2008 that prompted a swift, violent response from Chinese authorities.
Since then, he said, he has met many Chinese who say they were unaware of the Tibetan issue until the demonstrations. Now, he said, they find his call for a self- governing Tibet that remains a part of China to be “very sensible, very logical”.
He also said Chinese writers had published 800 articles in support of Tibetan autonomy, 300 of them published in China itself. Those figures could not be independently verified, the paper said.
During the interview in the presidential suite of a Beverly Hills hotel, the Dalai Lama also briefly discussed his Thursday meeting with Obama.
He said he had met with the President because “it was my duty to inform or report what the situation was in the relationship with the Chinese government.”
China had reacted angrily on the Obama-Dalai Lama meeting by accusing the US of “seriously undermining” bilateral ties by “conniving” with separatist forces.
Obama used his first presidential meeting with the Dalai Lama to press China to preserve Tibetan identity and to respect human rights in the region, which has been under Chinese occupation since 1950.
Tibetans in Tibet welcomed the meeting with with a defiant show of fireworks and auspicious prayer rituals. Reports said Tibetans in Rebkong (Ch: Tongren) and Ngaba in the Amdo Province of Tibet came out openly in large numbers around monasteries to burn incense and throw wind-horse prayer flags in the air to hail the meeting.
The Dalai Lama was reluctant to predict what impact the meeting would have.
“We will have to wait … it’s very difficult to predict,” Dalai Lama said in his interview with Reuters.
While in Washington, D.C., the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) on Friday presented the Dalai Lama with the Democracy Service Medal in recognition of his commitment to advancing the principles of democracy and human dignity.
Dalai Lama’s L.A. visit included a luncheon speech Saturday and a public address on Sunday at Gibson Amphitheatre, where he was joined by musician Sheryl Crow.
