(Oct. 5) - The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, arrived in Washington Monday for a week’s visit during which he will both bestow and receive awards for human rights. What he won’t do is engage in an event that has been the focal point of all ten of his visits to the capital since 1991: a meeting with the U.S. president.
In an agreement worked out over months of diplomacy exhaustively reconstructed by the Washington Post, Tibetan authorities agreed not to push the issue of a meeting this month with President Barack Obama, who will visit China in November. The Chinese government considers the Dalai Lama the leader of a separatist or “splittist” movement, and it strenuously objects as a matter of course to any foreign leader meeting with him. As its economic might grows, Beijing is proving increasingly successful at making its objections stick.
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Tim Sloan, AFP / Getty Images
The Dalai Lama arrives at Washington's Park Hyatt Hotel on Monday for a visit that will not feature a meeting with the president.
The Dalai Lama’s representative in Washington, Lodi Gyaltsen Gyari, said in a statement on Monday that “there has been no question” that Obama would not meet the Dalai Lama “at the appropriate time,” but that “taking a broader and long-term perspective, His Holiness agreed to meet the president after the November US-China Summit.”
The president’s departure from accepted treatment of the delicate issue of the Dalai Lama is neither isolated nor accidental. The Tibetan leader was in Canada last week, where he did not meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper either. In 2007, Harper had been the first Canadian Prime Minister to meet the Dalai Lama in public. That same year, President George W. Bush awarded the Tibetan the Congressional Medal of Freedom.
Since then, however, China has shown it can make its rancor felt. French President Nicolas Sarkozy ran afoul of Beijing in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, which he threatened to boycott to protest China’s human rights record. After activists in Paris jostled the Olympic torch, a torrent of anti-French feeling swept over China, including boycotts of French products. Sarkozy ended up attending the Beijing Olympics after all, but later that year, Beijing cancelled a European Union-China summit to protest Sarkozy’s plans to meet the Dalai Lama in December. Sarkozy was widely criticized in France for his unsteady management of a tricky diplomatic brief.
The Obama administration has gotten off to a much better start with Beijing, but it has too meaty an agenda to risk its relations going off track. Not only does Washington want to diminish the U.S.'s gargantuan trade deficit with China without triggering a trade war, but it also needs Beijing’s help in getting North Korea to rein in its nuclear arms and Iran to submit to international controls over its nuclear program.
"It took some skillful diplomacy to convince the Tibetans that not meeting the president was in their interest,” says Adam Segal, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Segal suggests, however, that since the fundamental stance of the U.S. towards Tibet is constant – that it is a part of China -- "it sets a bad precedent to step back from a meeting that wasn’t going to change that."
Still, says Segal, "The U.S. has been a good friend, maybe the best friend to the Dalai Lama, and that’s why the Tibetans don’t want to press the issue." In the face of a powerful Chinese adversary, avoiding a stand-off is a wiser move than provoking one. But as China's influence grows further, it is unlikely to get any easier for Tibet to push its case for more autonomy in Washington or anywhere else.
