Several hundred Tibetans gathered on Saturday, April 22, in Paris, 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! »proclaimed the demonstrators, gathered in front of the premises of France Télévisions, to denounce “media and television channels that did not do their job as journalists and relayed Chinese propaganda”in the words, at the microphone, of a spokesperson for the Tibetan community.
The crowd, estimated at several hundred people – including many children – by a journalist from Agence France-Presse (AFP), waved Tibetan flags, and many participants showed portraits of the Dalai Lama.
Six associations of the Tibetan community had called for this demonstration, in support of the spiritual leader of Tibet, after the dissemination of a video on social networks in recent days, which aroused a host of hostile reactions. This video, relayed more than a month after the events (February 28), shows the Dalai Lama in audience near Dharamsala (in northern India, where he lives in exile), with a young Indian boy accompanied from his mother. The Dalai Lama, 87, sticks his tongue out at the obviously taken aback child, just after asking him: “Can you suck my tongue? »triggering the hilarity of the assembly.
“A misinterpretation of the video”
The spiritual leader then presented ” his excuses “ to the boy and his family in a press release published on his Twitter account. “His Holiness often teases the people he meets in an innocent and playful way, even in public and in front of the cameras. [Elle] regret this incident, explains the press release.
For the Tibetan community in France, the hostile reactions are “a misinterpretation of the video”. She regrets that “decontextualized facts are circulating” in some French media, she says in a press release. “This has deeply saddened and hurt the Tibetan community, in France and around the world. »
“It is indeed a tease of the Dalai Lama”Françoise Robin, university professor at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations, told AFP. “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 do not 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”adds M.me Robin, while the Dalai Lama is “their hope and their pride”.
In 2019, the Dalai Lama had already issued a public apology for saying that if a woman were to succeed him, she would have to be “seductive”. These words, held during a BBC interviewhad also been controversial.