The Dalai Lama starts an 11-day visit to France tomorrow that threatened to spark a crisis between Paris and Beijing, until French President Nicolas Sarkozy quashed speculation he would meet the Tibetan spiritual leader.
Planned more than two years ago, the Nobel peace laureate’s French visit turned suddenly political after a Chinese crackdown on unrest in Tibet in March that sparked international outrage in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics.
Sarkozy’s initial threat to boycott the Olympic opening ceremony, together with rowdy pro-Tibet protests during the passage of the Olympic flame through Paris, fuelled a months-long diplomatic spat with Beijing.
And a decision by the Paris city hall, which is held by the opposition, to name the 73-year-old spiritual leader an honorary citizen further fanned tensions.
Though Sarkozy decided last month to attend Friday’s opening, noting progress in talks between China and the Dalai Lama, he failed to prevent a wave of protests targeting French commercial interests in China.
Speculation over a meeting with the Buddhist leader in France since then continued to pour oil on the fire, with the Chinese ambassador in Paris warning of “serious consequences” for bilateral relations.
The French leader’s office finally announced on Wednesday that no meeting would take place, saying it was the Dalai Lama’s decision.
The Dalai Lama’s representative in France, Wangpo Bashi, said that the “timing is not right,” adding that a meeting during the Olympics risked setting back talks between Tibetan and Chinese parties.
Instead, Sarkozy’s wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy — who under French law has no official function — will attend the inauguration by the Dalai Lama of a temple in southern France on Aug. 22.
On Wednesday, the Buddhist leader is scheduled to meet some 250 senators and deputies from the French parliamentary group on Tibet, before holding talks with leaders of the French Tibetan community.
The rest of his stay from tomorrow to Aug. 23 will be devoted to religious visits, in the Paris region and elsewhere, and a six-day teaching cycle in the western city of Nantes.
“It is first and foremost a spiritual, religious visit,” said Bashi, who heads the Tibet Bureau in Paris. “That is how it was always intended.”
France is home to an estimated 770,000 Buddhists, according to the French Buddhist union, three-quarters of them of Asian origin. The Dalai Lama has visited France a dozen times since 1982, meeting with city or government officials and once with the president, the late Francois Mitterrand, in 1993.
France’s left-wing Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and junior minister for human rights Rama Yade have both said they would be willing to meet him, but no such plans have been announced.
Sarkozy has been accused at home of flip-flopping on the issue of the Olympics and undermining France’s credibility in China.
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