Reportage – 2006

China must not put preconditions to Dalai Lama's visit: Dalai Lama's spokesman

MCLEOD GANJ, India, 3 April 2006

The exiled Tibetan government welcomed a Chinese leader's statement of a possible consideration to allow Dalai Lama to visit China but said it should be without any preconditions.

"We welcome the statement made by Ye Xiaowen, director of the cabinet's State Bureau of Religious Affairs, that China will discuss the proposed visit by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to China on a pilgrimage," said, Thupten Samphel, the spokesman of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

But Samphel said the consideration should be without any precondition.

Ye said that Dalai Lama must completely abandoned his quest for a Tibetan independence for him to visit China on a pilgrimage.

"It is not impossible for us to consider his visit," Ye told the China Daily, the government's English-language mouthpiece. "We can discuss it."

However, Samphel said that the Dalai Lama has sincerely made his stance crystal clear over the years that he is not seeking an independent Tibet but autonomy for Tibetans within the framework of the Chinese constitution.

"So, we feel that it is not appropriate to put preconditions to the visit," Samphel added.

The Dalai Lama first expressed his wish to visit China for a pilgrimage in 1991, to visit the Buddhist pilgrimge site Wutai mountain in Shanxi province.

The Dalai Lama expressed his wish to visit China on a pilgrimage and to see the changes and developments in that country as recently as March this year. The envoys of the Dalai Lama conveyed his wish to visit China on a pilgrimage during the fifth round of talks between the Chinese authorities in Beijing in February.