Thursday June 5 2:39 PM EDT

Oakland, Calif., June 5 (UPI) _ Berkeley has become the first city in the world to boycott companies doing business with Chinese-occupied Tibet.

The Oakland Tribune reports that the unanimous City Council vote came one week before the Dalai Lama, the refugee leader of Tibetan Buddhism, arrives in Berkeley for a speech.

The newspaper says that the effected companies now doing business with Berkeley are the Holiday Inn Corp., NEC and Kaiser Aluminum.

The event next Thursday at the University of California at Berkeley, billed as a conversation with Graduate School of Journalism Dean Orville Schell, an expert on China, is sold out.

In 1996, Berkeley was the first American city to fly the Tibetan flag on March 10, marking the Tibetan national uprising against the Chinese. On that day in 1959, the Chinese attempted to arrest the Dalai Lama. He was hidden and spirited out of the country to exile in Northern India.

This year several dozen American cities and more than 600 European cities flew the Tibetan flag on March 10. Congress and the United Nations also have condemned the Chinese occupation of Tibet.

The Tibetan religious leader, winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, will be in San Francisco Monday through Wednesday for the conference, ``Peacemaking:

The Power of Non-Violence.''

The conference also will feature 1996 Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos-Horta of East Timor and Yolanda King, daughter of Martin Luther King Jr.