Pressure from China keeps Dalai Lama off religious meet

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON, AUG. 25. The U.N. Secretary-General, Mr. Kofi Annan, has said pressure from China has forced organisers of the religious conference to keep the Dalai Lama out of the meeting. ``This house is really a house for the member-states and their sensitivities matter,'' Mr. Annan has remarked by way of a comment on why the Dalai Lama has been barred from participating in the religious summit.

``I personally believe that having a thousand religious leaders here next week talking about peace, talking about our world and praying for all of us and praying for peace is progress,'' he said, making a point that concessions to member-states are essential as the world body could not afford the ``absolute best'' in the search for progress in world peace.

The summit opens in New York next Monday and is a part of the millennium events that will culminate in a summit between September 6 and 8 which will be attended by leaders from 150 nations. The U.S. President, Mr. Bill Clinton, will address the opening session of the summit on September 6. He is expected to talk to several world leaders during the three-day summit. The Russian President, Mr. Vladimir Putin, and the Chinese President, Mr. Jiang Zemin, will also participate in the event.

The Prime Minister, Mr. A. B. Vajpayee, will also attend the conference and will address on September 8. He is expected to hold bilateral meetings; but a meeting with the Pakistani Chief Executive, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has been ruled out by Indian officials here.

Conservatives in the U.S. are focussing on the religious summit set to start next week; and they have lashed out at both the United Nations for appeasing communist nations and dictators and the Clinton Administration for not doing enough to ensure that the Dalai Lama did participate in the event. The first two days of the summit will be held in the United Nations General Assembly chamber; and the organisers were advised that China would be ``outraged'' if the Dalai Lama was to be a part of the proceedings.

The organisers asked the Dalai Lama to attend the last two days of the session and to give the concluding address from a city hotel. However, the Lama declined the offer. The United Nations is not an official sponsor of the summit, the funding for which is coming from Mr. Ted Turner's United Nations Foundation, the Better World Fund and a Coalition of Inter-Faith leaders. More than 1,000 religious leaders will be attending the meeting.

``China's rulers have a heinous record of crimes against religious freedom in their own country and in Tibet, yet the U.N. is letting them have the final word about who can attend this religious peace summit. The hypocrisy of not inviting the Dalai Lama who is the winner of the Nobel Peace prize and renowned spiritual leader to a summit about the role of faith in promoting peace is outrageous. Beijing's strangehold on the U.N. is once again polarising the cause of religious freedom around the world,'' the Family Research Council has said.

The chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Jesse Helms, slammed the United Nations for being ``weak kneed'' for excluding the Dalai Lama. ``... can it be that the United Nations has chosen to appease the Communist dictators in Beijing - who drove the Dalai Lama into exile in the first place and who continue to oppress the Tibetan people - rather than include one of the world's most known and respected spiritual leaders?,'' Mr. Helms asked in a letter to Mr. Richard Holbrooke, the United States' Ambassador to the United Nations.

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