China May Talk With Dalai Lama About Tibet Protests, Future

British officials are reporting that the Chinese government may be willing to engage in talks with the Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile and the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists worldwide. (Dalai Lama's official website.) This announcement comes in the middle of a Tibetan Uprising movement that is moving past its epicenter, the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, to cover the entire Tibetan Plateau with peaceful protests, occasional violence, and both overt and covert retribution by Chinese police and military forces. (Pressure on China to act deliberately is, of course, undercut by Bush's repeated assurances that he will attend the Olympics -- which he considers merely a sporting event -- regardless of how China abuses human rights.)

News from Tibet is being suppressed by government officials, but some still leaks out, including this video from a tourist.

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Contact information for all Chinese embassies and consulates in the U.S., and Chinese officials responsible for next summer's Olympic Games in Beijing, can be found here. It's a critical time to keep the pressure on China, so please make some polite calls to say, "the world is watching."

Previous VichyDems posts about the situation in Tibet: 1) Background and description of initial events; 2) Hillary Clinton's refusal to object to Administration removing China from annual list of human rights violators.
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