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Dalai Lama named honorary citizen of Warsaw

AFP

The Dalai Lama seen in a file photo taken in Dharamshala, India, on 8 March 2009. Poland’s capital Warsaw named the Dalai Lama an honorary citizen of the city.File photo/Tibet Sun/Lobsang Wangyal/India

Poland’s capital Warsaw risked the ire of China Thursday as local councillors voted to make the Dalai Lama an honorary citizen of the city.

Spokesman Slawomir Paszkiet told AFP that the councillors had voted unanimously to grant the symbolic status to the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader.

“As municipal councillors in a city which has gone through so many trials in its history, we have the moral right and the duty to honour a man who seeks for his compatriots and his country the freedom and sovereignty that we have ourselves enjoyed for the past 20 years,” the councillors said in a joint declaration, referring to Warsaw’s destruction during the World War II Nazi German occupation and the 1989 fall of Poland’s communist regime.

The Dalai Lama is due to receive his honorary citizenship when he visits Warsaw at the end of July.

He last visited Poland in December to take part in ceremonies marking the 25th anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Lech Walesa, the leader of communist-era Poland’s Solidarity freedom movement.

He also met with Polish President Lech Kaczynski.

The December trip sparked an angry reaction from Beijing after a meeting on the sidelines of the Walesa ceremony between the Dalai Lama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose country was then at the helm of the 27-nation European Union.

The Dalai Lama is due to visit Paris next month to be made an honorary citizen of the French capital.

Earlier this month, China warned Paris not to make more “errors” on Tibet ahead of the Dalai Lama’s visit, just as frosty ties between the two nations had improved in the wake of the Sarkozy meeting.

Beijing accuses the Dalai Lama of seeking independence for Tibet from Chinese rule and considers any official meeting with the leader as meddling in China’s internal affairs.

The Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile in India since 1959, insists he is simply pushing for autonomy for the Himalayan region.

Copyright © 2009 AFP

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