World Tibet Network News Saturday, June 20, 1998

NANTERRE, France, June 19 (AFP) - A French museum guard died after burning himself alive in a park to help the fight for Tibetan rights, police said Friday.

Gilles Blanchard, a guard at the Rodin museum in the southwest Paris suburb of Meudon, said in a suicide note that he wanted "to make a pacifist gesture to help Tibetans win freedom from China's persecution."

Two children and a young man tried to save Blanchard by dousing the flames with wet clothes and sand when he set fire to himself in the park.

The death came Wednesday during a visit to France by the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

He met top French officials during a three-day visit but leaders of the executive declined to hold talks with him.

The Dalai Lama met National Assembly Speaker Laurent Fabius, the third most important person in the French state hierarchy, before addressing the assembly's Foreign Affairs Committee, at the invitation of its chairman, former culture minister Jack Lang.

He told the foreign affairs committee that the situation in Tibet was "seriously deteriorating"

He said China was carrying out "cultural genocide in Tibet, intentional or not." Beijing annexed the Himalayan territory in 1959, triggering the exile of the Dalai Lama, now 62.