Sunday 27 September 2009
Will Obama’s Dalai Lama gambit pay dividends?
Barack Obama made history last year when he became the first African-American to be elected president of the United States. Next month, he will make history again, of a different sort. He will become the first president not to meet with the Dalai Lama when the Tibetan leader visits Washington.
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Will Obama’s Dalai Lama gambit pay dividends?
By FRANK CHING
25 September 2009
Barack Obama made history last year when he became the first African-American to be elected president of the United States. Next month, he will make history again, of a different sort. He will become the first president not to meet with the Dalai Lama when the Tibetan leader visits Washington.
Ever since April 1991, when then president George HW Bush met the Nobel laureate, he has been received by the American president, regardless of party. Both Bill Clinton and George W Bush met the Buddhist monk each time he came to the American capital.
However, China has been sending signals to warn President Obama not to meet with the Dalai Lama in October, when he is scheduled to visit Washington. And last week, the president sent a delegation led by White House adviser Valerie Jarrett and Under Secretary of State Maria Otero, who has been designated special coordinator for Tibetan issues, to Dharamsala in India to meet the Tibetan leader to explain the Obama administration’s Tibet policy.
They explained that because Mr. Obama is scheduled to pay his first visit to China in November, it would be better not to meet the Dalai Lama in October. Instead, they said, there could be a meeting after Mr. Obama’s China trip.
The Obama administration no doubt remembers that last year, after French President Nicolas Sarkozy defied China by announcing that he would meet the Tibetan spiritual leader, Beijing cancelled a summit meeting with the European Union, of which Mr. Sarkozy at that time held the rotating presidency. That meeting was rescheduled only five months later.
Of course, the United States was in a much stronger position vis-a-vis China in the 1990s. Beijing was fearful of losing its most-favoured-nation trading status and desirous of American support for it to join the World Trade Organization. Now, Beijing is Washington’s biggest creditor and the United States wants China to continue to lend it money by buying Treasury bonds.
The American officials assured the Dalai Lama that President Obama would raise the Tibetan issue in his talks with Chinese leaders. Ms. Jarrett also conveyed the president’s commitment ‘to support the Tibetan people in protecting their distinct religious, linguistic and cultural heritage and securing respect for their human rights and civil liberties’.
She also said that Washington would be in a better position to seek progress for the dialogue between representative of the Dalai Lama and Beijing, as well as improvements in human rights in Tibet, if there was a strong US-China relationship.
The Dalai Lama did not disagree. In fact, he expressed his appreciation for Mr. Obama’s concern for the situation in Tibet and hoped that during the Obama presidency, ‘the Tibetan people can see progress in the resolution of their problem’. But what does the Tibetan government-in-exile really think of Mr. Obama’s decision not to meet the Dalai Lama?
‘A lot of nations are adopting a policy of appeasement,’ Samdhong Rinpoche, head of the exile government, told journalists. ‘Even the US government is doing some kind of appeasement. Today, economic interests are much greater than other interests.’
Now that Mr. Obama’s actions have brought about charges of appeasement, he will have to show that his desire not to provoke China before his Beijing visit is worthwhile. That means that he will not only have to raise the Tibet issue during his talks in China but he will have to show that he made progress, especially on the Tibet issue, during his visit.
Otherwise, he will be widely condemned for sacrificing the interests of Tibetans for other gains.
Of course, future events may show that this was a wise tactic. But, on the face of it, Mr. Obama stands to lose more than he may gain. He has made a pre-emptive concession to China and it remains to be seen whether he will have anything to show for it.
Moreover, the United States has made it clear that a meeting with the Dalai Lama has simply been deferred until after November. This will not necessarily please China. After all, it was Mr. Sarkozy’s announcement that he would meet the Tibetan leader that led to the cancellation of the EU summit.
What China wants is an end to all meetings with the Dalai Lama rather than simply rescheduling them.
In any event, there is now a precedent. China is likely to put more, not less, pressure on the United States in the future not to meet the Dalai Lama, and indeed not to do anything of which Beijing may disapprove.
Hopefully, the visit to Beijing in November will show that this was a risk worth taking.
The writer is a Hong Kong-based journalist and commentator
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