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World Tibet Network News Monday, August 7, 2000

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2. Blackballing the Dalai Lama

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Boston Globe - Editorial
Monday, August 7, 2000

The snub was "totally bizarre and quite unbelievable," South Africa's
Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote Friday in a letter to UN Secretary General
Kofi Annan. Tutu was protesting the UN decision not to invite his fellow
Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the Dalai Lama, to the Millennium World
Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders at the United Nations in
late August.

The failure to invite the Dalai Lama harms the UN most of all. As Tutu
lamented in his letter, that failure "compromises the integrity of the
United Nations and the credibility of the summit."

By bowing to opposition from China, Annan and his colleagues placed
themselves in the position of creating a truly bizarre contradiction. If
more than 1,000 religious and spiritual leaders have been invited to the
UN to assist that world body in its work of resolving conflicts and
making peace, then there can be no logical reason to exclude the Tibetan
Buddhist leader who has succeeded Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King
Jr. as the world's most eminent apostle of nonviolence.

To his credit, Annan did not try to hide the motive for leaving the
Dalai Lama off the summit's invitation list. Said Annan's spokesman,
Fred Eckhard: "China would object vehemently to his presence here
because they consider Tibet their territory and the Dalai Lama
challenges that."

For all its candor, this explanation of Annan's Realpolitik raises some
discomfiting questions. First, there is the obvious effect of
undermining the purpose of the Millennium Conference. There could be no
more fit subject for a spiritual summit on peace than China's
colonization of Tibet and the violent Communist repression of Buddhism
in Tibetan homes and monasteries.

Then there is Annan's own inconsistency. After all, this is the
secretary general who went to Baghdad and said Saddam Hussein was a man
he could do business with after that most violent of tyrants violated UN
resolutions on inspection of his weapons of mass destruction. A UN
secretary general who can do business with Saddam but not permit
dialogue with the Dalai Lama has his priorities confused.

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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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