WikiLeaks cables: Dalai Lama called for focus on climate, not politics, in Tibet

By Jason Burke in Delhi, www.guardian.co.uk
Thursday 16 December 2010 21.30 GMT The Dalai Lama told US diplomats last year that the international community should focus on climate change rather than politics in Tibet because environmental problems were more urgent, secret American cables reveal. The exiled Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader told Timothy Roemer, the US ambassador to India, that the “political agenda should be sidelined for five to 10 years and the international community should shift its focus to climate change on the Tibetan plateau” during a meeting in Delhi last August. “Melting glaciers, deforestation and increasingly polluted water from mining projects were problems that ‘cannot wait’, but the Tibetans could wait five to 10 years for a political solution,” he was reported as saying. Though the Dalai Lama has frequently raised environmental issues, he has never publicly suggested that political questions take second place, nor spoken of any timescale with such precision. Roemer speculated, in his cable to Washington reporting the meeting, that “the Dalai Lama’s message may signal a broader shift in strategy to reframe the Tibet issue as an environmental concern”. In their meeting, the ambassador reported, the Dalai Lama criticised China‘s energy policy, saying dam construction in Tibet had displaced thousands of people and left temples and monasteries underwater. …