TAIPEI, May 16 – The exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, is to send an envoy to Taiwan for Chen Shui-bian’s presidential inauguration this week, an official said on Sunday, in a move likely to anger rival China.
Kasur Tashiwangdi, the Dalai Lama’s former representative to New Delhi, will attend the Thursday’s inauguration to congratulate Chen, Presidential Office spokesman Huang Chih-fang said.
“Tashiwangdi will meet with President Chen,” Huang said.
The spokesman also said the Dalai Lama had written to Chen to voice his sympathy when he and his deputy, Annette Lu, were shot on the eve of the March 20 presidential polls. They were slightly wounded in the unsolved shooting.
The Dalai Lama is labelled a “splittist” by China, which had been occupying Tibet since 1951. He fled Tibet in 1959 and has formed a government in exile in the northern Indian town of Dharamsala.
He once called for Tibetan independence but has adopted a conciliatory approach, instead demanding large-scale autonomy for the region.
China also accuses Taiwan of trying to formally split from the mainland.
The island has been ruled separately from the rest of China since the end of a civil war in 1949, and Beijing, which considers it a breakaway province, has declared it would invade if Taiwan declared independence or descended into chaos.
