Boston Globe

By Globe Staff, 04/21/97

The Dalai Lama will be visiting Washington this week; he will take part in a Passover Seder freedom celebration and an interfaith service at the National Cathedral. President Clinton should also receive the spiritual leader of Tibet in the Oval Office - a gesture that would demonstrate America's support not only for the values of religious freedom and cultural survival, and but also for the human rights of the Tibetan people.

During the Dalai Lama's last three visits, the White House has tried to placate Beijing by staging awkward and embarrassing ``drop-by'' visits. That scenario has the Nobel Peace Prize laureate being received by Vice President Al Gore and Clinton dropping by, as though the president of the United States haphazardly encountered the Dalai Lama in the course of a private visit.

The diplomatic fiction implicit in this stratagem is that such encounters have no more official significance than any other chance meeting between Clinton and a private citizen. The inevitable effect is to make American support for Tibet look weaker than it should in the eyes of Beijing, of the Tibetans, and of the American public.

Neither Clinton nor the Dalai Lama wishes to challenge what Chinese leaders consider their territorial integrity. True to his Buddhist beliefs, the Dalai Lama has unfailingly counseled a peaceful transition to autonomy for Tibet, rather than independence. He has repeatedly asked Beijing to enter a dialogue without preconditions. Moreover, the Dalai Lama supports an American policy of engagement with China, regarding any attempt to isolate the most populous country in the world as a doomed return to Cold War practices.

As George Bush demonstrated, however, engagement need not mean that a US president is forbidden from holding substantive, one-on-one talks with the Dalai Lama. Tibetans are being tortured in Chinese prisons. Their religion is being suppressed by communist authorities. They are becoming a minority in their own land. The least Clinton can do is to make a symbolic gesture of American solidarity with victims of oppression.