Hawks blocking Dalai Lama invite 

HONG KONG: A second day of talks between Chinese officials and the Dalai Lama’s special envoys concluded in Beijing amid signs of a conservative backlash building up within the Communist Party against yielding to global pressure to invite the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader to China.  

No details were available of the substance of Wednesday’s secret talks between Chinese interlocutors and the Dalai Lama’s envoys, Lodi Gyari and Kelsang Gyaltsen. But Tibetan hopes that an invitation to the Dalai Lama to visit China would be proffered as a sign of progress in the formal talks have not been realised.  

DNA had reported on Wednesday, citing informed sources, that the Chinese authorities may extend such an invitation to the Dalai Lama as part of a peace deal to ensure
a boycott-free Olympics and to pacify Tibetan sentiments.

World leaders, including  US President George Bush and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, have come under pressure to boycott the Olympics opening ceremony as a mark of protest against China’s repressive handling of the recent Tibetan  uprising.   

Conservative elements within the Communist Party stepped up their rhetoric of denunciation of the Dalai Lama, evidently to sabotage any attempt at effecting a reconciliation of sorts by inviting the Dalai Lama. Tibet’s Communist Party leader Zhang Qingli, who has in the past called the Dalai Lama “a wolf in monk’s robes”, has reiterated the charge that the exiled leader and his supporters were responsible for the March 14 violence in Tibet.  

“The March 14 incident was a violent criminal incident masterminded by the Dalai clique, with the support and instigation of hostile Western forces,” Zhang said. It was timed to “sabotage the Olympics”, he added.  

More media commentaries critical of the Dalai Lama, and targeting the Tibetan Youth Congress as “a radical spearhead of violence supported and employed by the Dalai Lama clique”, were published on Wednesday.