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World Tibet Network News Monday, August 7, 2000

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1. Blacklisting the Dalai Lama

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The New York Times - Editorial
August 7, 2000

Geopolitics has tainted the Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious
and Spiritual Leaders planned for New York City later this month. The
meeting, paid for mainly by private foundations, will be held at the
United Nations a week before a similar gathering of world political
leaders. It will bring together more than 1,000 religious figures. But
under pressure from China, organizers have not invited the Dalai Lama,
spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1989, to attend any of the meetings on the grounds of the U.N. Other
attendees and the conference's financial backers should oppose his
exclusion.

China detests the Dalai Lama because he is a symbol of the distinctive
Tibetan culture Beijing has been trying to destroy for the past 41
years. China regularly uses its power as a member of the Security
Council to block his participation in U.N.-sponsored events. The Dalai
Lama has told the conference organizers that they should go ahead
without him. But it would be better to take a stand against his
unjustifiable exclusion.

Some have already done so. Desmond Tutu, the retired archbishop of Cape
Town and himself a Nobel Peace laureate, has urged the U.N. secretary
general, Kofi Annan, to invite the Dalai Lama to the conference. So have
Representatives Tom Lantos and John Edward Porter, co-chairmen of the
Congressional Human Rights Caucus.

The conference's chief financial underwriter, Ted Turner, and the
religious leaders planning to attend should make clear that if the U.N.
is not prepared to reverse itself, they will move the conference to
another location. A gathering of spiritual and religious leaders for
world peace should not have a political admissions test.

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Articles in this Issue:

1. Blacklisting the Dalai Lama
2. Blackballing the Dalai Lama
3. Nepal using Tibet trade routes to transport food supplies
4. China to Upgrade Lhasa's Telecom

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