Tibet Information Network / 188-196 Old St, London EC1 9FR, UK

ph: +44-171 814 9011 fax: +44-171 814 9015 email: tin@gn.apc.org

-------- TIN - AN INDEPENDENT INFORMATION SERVICE -------------

TIN News Update / 30 May, 1997 / total no of pages:1 ISSN 1355-3313

Dalai Lama: "Rebirth Outside Tibet" -

The Dalai Lama will be reborn if the Chinese-Tibetan dispute has not been resolved by the time he dies, the exile Tibetan leader said in a speech this week, adding that the reincarnation would "definitely" be born outside Tibet if the dispute continues.

The Tibetan leader has previously avoided saying whether there will be another Dalai Lama after him and is not known to have said before where his successor will be born.

"If I die in exile, and if the Tibetan people wish to continue the institution of the Dalai Lama, my reincarnation will not be born under Chinese control," he told a meeting of Tibetan exiles during a visit to New York on Sunday 25th May.

"The 15th Dalai Lama will be more competent and better than the present", added the Tibetan leader, who is considered by his followers to be the 14th of his line.

"That reincarnation will definitely not come under Chinese control; it will be outside, in the free world. This I can say with absolute certainty," he continued, according to transcripts by the Tibetan language service of the Washington-based radio station Voice of America.

The statement appears to be the lama's first public response to a bizarre press campaign being waged by Beijing about the Dalai Lama's death. Chinese officials and journalists have been highlighting the Tibetan leader's increasing age since the lama turned sixty in 1995.

"The Dalai Lama is getting on in years and worries," declared a headline in China's Tibet, an official magazine produced in Beijing, in February 1995. "He is well aware of what the future holds, and worries that upon his death Tibetans in exile will lose their spiritual leader, and no one in the exile clique can assume his position," continued the magazine's lead article, which said that the exile movement would disintegrate once its leader died.

Last winter the same magazine said that the Dalai Lama had a "yearning for longevity" and accused him of hoping to live to the age of 120. The "hysterical" lama was locked in an occult battle to prevent religious opponents in India using esoteric powers to make him die earlier, suggested the magazine's lead article.

The articles have strengthened rumours that since contacts between Beijing and the exiles broke down in September 1993 the Chinese authorities have suspended any plans for negotiations with the Dalai Lama and intend to wait for his death to resolve the dispute.

The Tibetan system of rule-by-incarnation is deeply flawed because it always involves 20 year periods of uncertainty while a new leader is selected and brought up from infancy. The exiles face additional problems, as indicated by China's Tibet, because they have not agreed on the Dalai Lama's earlier proposals that they appoint a secular leader to partly replace him.

The Dalai Lama said on Sunday that he was making his statement to refute claims that China will be able to control the selection of his reincarnation, if the dispute remains unsettled. The claims were fuelled by the 1995 confrontation over the selection of the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, the highest ranking lama to have remained in Tibet, which led China to insist that according to a 1792 treaty "the conferment of titles of Dalai and Panchen" are dependent on "approval by China's Central Government".