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Dalai Lama begins official programme of French visit

AFP

A TV grab released by the association Ocean de sagesse shows Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama arriving at a Tibetan centre in Veneux-les-Sablons, near Paris. The visit comes ahead of a high-profile 12-day visit during which the Tibetan spiritual guide abandoned plans to meet President Nicolas Sarkozy.File photo/AFP/France

The 73-year-old Tibetan spiritual guide flew into Paris on Monday for the 12-day visit at the height of the Beijing Olympics, having shelved plans to meet President Nicolas Sarkozy for fear of angering China.

He will lead a private ceremony early Tuesday at the centre in Veneux-les-Sablons outside Paris, before beginning his official visit with the blessing of a Vietnamese Buddhist temple in nearby Evry, in the presence of 1,500 followers.

On Wednesday the Nobel peace laureate will hold closed-door talks with French lawmakers, but no government-level meetings are planned.

Instead of Sarkozy, first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy will attend the inauguration of a temple in Lodeve in southern France Friday next week.

The rest of his visit that runs to August 23, which coincides almost exactly with the Beijing Games, will be devoted to religious visits in northwestern Normandy and Brittany and a six-day teaching cycle in the western city of Nantes.

Planned more than two years ago, the Dalai Lama’s French visit suddenly turned political after a Chinese crackdown on unrest in Tibet in March that sparked international outrage.

Tentative plans for a meeting with Sarkozy were dropped, at the Dalai Lama’s request, to avoid angering China and setting back talks between Tibetan and Chinese parties, Sarkozy’s office and members of the Buddhist leader’s entourage said.

Beijing, which accuses the Dalai Lama of fomenting unrest in Tibet to sabotage the Olympics, warned Paris a meeting would have “serious consequences” for bilateral relations.

France is struggling to mend ties frayed by Sarkozy’s initial threat to boycott the opening of the Beijing Games, together with pro-Tibet protests during the passage of the Olympic flame through Paris that sparked a wave of anti-French protests in China.

France is home to an estimated 770,000 Buddhists, according to the French Buddhist union, three-quarters of them of Asian origin.

Copyright © 2008 Agence France Presse

Published in Channel NewsAsia