Poland Fetes Dalai Lama
Published: Thursday, 11 December, 2008
Warsaw, Poland, 11 December 2008 (By Louise Ireland, Reuters) - Forget the economic crisis, forget climate
change, images of an elderly, bespectacled Buddhist monk in a maroon robe have
dominated Polish newspapers and television screens all week.
The Dalai Lama has come to town and it seems everybody, from
the president and prime minister to college students and housewives in this
still-staunchly Roman Catholic country, want to meet and hear
Tibet's exiled
spiritual leader.
Of course, the charismatic septuagenarian can bring out the
crowds in many countries and counts among his worldwide fans heads of state and
Hollywood stars. But he has struck a special chord in
Poland, where
some see in his decades-old campaign for Tibetan self-determination echoes of
their own struggle against an atheistic communist government back in the 1980s.
Not by accident, the Buddhist leader kicked off his six-day
tour of Poland in Gdansk at a party for another modern icon - Lech Walesa, leader of the pro-democracy Solidarity
trade union which helped topple communist rule in Poland in 1989, the year the
Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Although other Nobel laureates and European statesmen such
as French President Nicolas Sarkozy were also in
Gdansk for the celebrations marking the 25th
anniversary of Walesa winning the Nobel Prize, the loudest applause was
reserved for the Dalai Lama. Newspapers carried pictures of him and his old
friend Walesa hugging and laughing together.
The Dalai Lama, who fled to exile in
India in 1959 after a failed uprising against
Beijing's rule, told
Poles how much he had been inspired by the example of Solidarity, a movement
rooted in religious - Catholic - faith and like him opposed to the use of violence.
The Poles returned the compliment by turning out in their
thousands in
Gdansk, Krakow,
Wroclaw
and
Warsaw to
hear the Dalai speak about Buddhist philosophy and about the Tibetan people's
experience of Chinese communist rule.
"Our young people are eager to hear about moral values,"
said Marta Kudelska, a professor of Indian philosophy at
Krakow
University
and one of the organisers of the Dalai's visit.
For Poles of older generations who remember communist
oppression, she added, there is an instinctive empathy for the Dalai Lama and
his cause.
"About a year ago, I got a call from the Chinese embassy (in
Warsaw)
complaining about our preparations for the visit. It was not pleasant, it
reminded me of the days of martial law in
Poland," she said, referring to the
Soviet-backed communist regime's efforts to stifle democracy in the early
1980s."
"For people of my generation, this memory of the past, of
communist times, helps us to better understand the Dalai Lama's way; I think
his way is similar to that of (
India's
pacifist leader) Mathatma Gandhi or of Lech Walesa and Solidarity here."
When I visited Tibet 20 years ago, I remember how monks,
some of them just children, would furtively approach me in the Potala Palace - the
Dalai Lama's former residence in the capital Lhasa - to ask, out of earshot of
our Chinese tour guide, whether I had any pictures of His Holiness.
I did not - I had flown into
Lhasa
from the Chinese city of
Chengdu - but an American
couple on our tour discreetly dispensed pictures they had brought from neighbouring
Nepal.
The joy of the monks was a revelation to us all
.
Fast-forward 20 years, and both
China
and
Tibet
have been transformed.
China
is far richer and more open today, though it is still not a democracy and
continues to keeps tight control over
Tibet. However,
Beijing points to the numerous monasteries
and monks and nuns there as evidence of religious freedom.
What else has changed in the past 20 years is that the
Tibetan cause itself has become much more widely known through the Dalai Lama's
high-profile globe-trotting.
In
Poland,
I caught up with the Dalai Lama in his hotel in Krakow where he told us - in
his distinctive Indian-accented English - of his wish to reach out to ordinary
Chinese people while also urging Western leaders to stand firm on human rights
in their ongoing dialogue with economic powerhouse
China
.
Asked whether he ever expected to see
Tibet again, he
was characteristically philosophical, "I really feel like that. But if not, it
does not much matter. We have a Tibetan proverb, your home is where you feel
most happy."
