Several hundred Tibetans gathered in Paris on Saturday in support of the Dalai Lama, violently attacked on social networks and in the media, after a video which created controversy. “Stop defaming his holiness!”, “Stop Chinese propaganda!”, shouted the demonstrators, gathered in front of the premises of France Télévisions, to denounce “media and television channels which have not done their job of journalists and relayed Chinese propaganda”, according to the words, at the microphone, of a spokesperson for the Tibetan community.
The crowd, estimated at several hundred people, including many children, by an AFP journalist, waved Tibetan flags and many participants carried portraits of the Dalai Lama. Six associations of the Tibetan community had called for this demonstration, in support of the spiritual and religious leader of Tibet, after the broadcast of a video on social networks in recent days, which aroused a host of hostile reactions.
The saddened and hurt Tibetan community
This video, relayed more than a month after the events (February 28), shows the Dalai Lama in audience near Dharamsala (northern India, where he lives in exile), with a young Indian boy accompanied by his mother . The 87-year-old Dalai Lama sticks his tongue out at the obviously disconcerted child, just after asking him: “Can you suck my tongue?”, triggering the hilarity of the assembly. The spiritual leader later “apologized” to the boy and his family on his Twitter account, saying he “often teases the people (he) meets in an innocent and playful way” and that he “regrets this incident” . For the Tibetan community in France, the hostile reactions are “a misinterpretation of the video”.
She regrets that “decontextualized facts are circulating” in certain French media, she said in a press release. “This has deeply saddened and hurt the Tibetan community, in France and all over the world”. “It is indeed a tease of the Dalai Lama”, told AFP Françoise Robin, university professor at Inalco (National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations). “Among the Tibetans, there is an expression, eat my tongue, which stems from a game between children and their elders: when the former ask the latter for a little money or a candy, and the latter have nothing left to give, they say: eat my tongue”. “It is very difficult to measure the pain that this manipulation has inflicted on the Tibetans”, she adds, while the Dalai Lama is “their hope and their pride”.