World Tibet Network News Thursday, April 02, 1998

NEW DELHI, April 2 (Reuters) - Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, met with six Tibetan hunger strikers in the Indian capital on Thursday.

``I told them that I admire their determination and enthusiasm. But I consider hunger strike unto death as a kind of violence,'' the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC) quoted the Dalai Lama as saying after his brief meeting with the protesters.

``However, I cannot offer them suggestions for any alternative method...I am in a state of dilemma,'' he said.

The hunger strikers, now in their 24th day of fasting, want the United Nations to appoint a special envoy on Tibet to solve the question of Tibetan autonomy peacefully under a U.N.-sponsored plebiscite.

They are also requesting that the United Nations appoint a special investigator into alleged human rights violations in Tibet.

In support of the hunger strikers, 2,000 Tibetans marched through the streets of New Delhi on Thursday and submitted a memorandum to the United Nations expressing their solidarity, the TYC said in a statement.

Chinese forces entered Tibet in 1950, ending its centuries of near-totalitarian autonomy. The Dalai Lama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his peaceful campaign for greater Tibetan autonomy, fled to India in 1959.

The Dalai Lama said there should be dialogue between Tibetans and the Chinese government, and was waiting for Beijing to accept his initiatives for dialogue.

``I am always ready as soon as some response comes from Beijing,'' the TYC quoted the Dalai Lama as saying.

Last week, Hollywood actor Richard Gere, a disciple of the Dalai Lama's Tibetan Buddhism and a critic of what he calls China's ``cultural genocide'' in Tibet, also visited the hunger strikers.