Politicians face tough choices in meeting with leader of free-Tibet movement
By MICHAEL VALPY
See the Dalai Lama come to Canada. See Canadian politicians walk carefully on eggshells.
Four weeks before the world-popular religious and exiled Tibetan secular leader starts an 18-day, three-city visit, the Prime Minister, the premiers of British Columbia and Ontario, and the mayors of Vancouver, Ottawa and Toronto either can’t decide whether to meet him or haven’t been able to mesh their schedules with his.
Desmond Tutu, Vaclav Havel and the Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi can find time to join him for a roundtable discussion in Vancouver. Singer Alanis Morissette can fit him into her schedule in Ottawa. The president and faculty of University of Toronto can arrange to give him an honorary degree, as can their counterparts at Vancouver’s two universities.
But Prime Minister Paul Martin? “We haven’t made a decision yet,” a spokeswoman said.
Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty? “We will respond in due course,” a spokesman said.
B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell? “There’s no intention of having a meeting, but a lunch is being considered for the whole [roundtable] group,” a provincial government official said.
“We’re trying to host a reception for him, but we haven’t been able to arrange a date,” a member of Toronto Mayor David Miller’s staff said.
“The city has sent an invitation for a courtesy call. This kind of thing takes a few days to arrange,” a spokesman for Ottawa’s City Council said.
“No official event [for the Dalai Lama] has been organized, and the mayor will be out of the country,” a spokeswoman at Vancouver City Hall said. And, of course, the political leaders’ offices say, their absence of concrete intentions is not the result of representations from the Chinese government, which has had direct sovereignty over Tibet for 54 years and strenuously objects to official acknowledgment of the Dalai Lama.
The 69-year-old Buddhist monk, likely the planet’s best-known religious figure after the Pope and Billy Graham, was both spiritual and government leader of Tibet until China claimed sovereignty in 1950 and took full control by force in 1959 — at which point the Dalai Lama fled across the Himalayas into exile in northern India, where he has lived ever since, joined by more than 80,000 of his fellow countrymen and countrywomen.
As his religious popularity has increased in the West, his advocacy for Tibet’s freedom has acquired a higher and higher profile. In the late 1980s, he abandoned the case for outright independence and instead has pressed for a negotiated internal autonomy for Tibet with defence and foreign affairs left to the Chinese.
The Chinese government continues to call him a “splittist.”
