France, April 27 – The 14th birthday of the 11th Panchen Lama, Gendhun Choekyi Nyima, was celebrated with sorrow in France saturday, mainly by the TSGs Etudiants pour un Tibet Libre, Solidarite Tibet, Communaute Tibetaine en France, Lions des Neiges and France-Tibet. About 300 people came to demonstrate for Panchen Rinpoche in PARIS and LYON. They were about 20 Tibetans in Paris, and one of them, Tobten, gave a very touching talk about effort to release Panchen Rinpoche.
A petition requesting his release and a visit of a UN delegation is now reaching 100000 signatures and should be handed over to President Chirac and Kofi Annan. An appeal has been signed by 346 groups and personalities so far. Representatives from TSGs gave speeches about the situation in Tibet, and about the visit in China, the same day, of the french Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin. The speakers expressed criticism that the Prime Minister did not put the Human Right issue on his agenda, at least on the official one.
At the beginning of this week, a conference was held in La Sorbonne, the famous University in Paris, also organised by Association France-Tibet and Etudiants pour un Tibet Libre. Given the recent execution of Lobsang Dhondup and the death sentence of Tenzin Delek Rinpotche, the subject of the conference was about the repression and capital punishment.
Marie Holzman, a famous specialist on China, gave an excellent talk, where she analysed the recent death sentences in Tibet, underlining the absence of logic of these sad events. Other speakers were Tobten, a Tibetan who presented the situation in Tibet, and the chinese Jianping Zhang who spoke about the repression of the Falun Gong movement. The President of Ensemble Contre la Peine de Mort gave a speech where he outlined the necessity of uniting forces for abolition of death penalty in China and Tibet.
