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OSLO : German Chancellor Angela Merkel said here Saturday she was ready to meet the Dalai Lama again despite the trouble her last meeting with him caused for German-Chinese relations.
"I believe that if I've already met him once, I will do so again," she told a press conference here.
She said she would be unable to meet Tibet's exiled spiritual leader during his forthcoming visit to Germany next month because she would be away in Latin America.
Merkel was quoted by a German newspaper Saturday as saying she was willing to meet the Dalai Lama again despite the spat over their last encounter that damaged ties with China.
That meeting last September precipitated a crisis in relations and it was only in January during a visit to Germany by Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi that his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier could speak of restored relations.
There was no precise plan to meet the Dalai Lama before the opening of the Beijing Olympics in August, Merkel said here through an interpreter.
She also reiterated her appeal for peaceful and direct dialogue between Beijing and the Dalai Lama over the current unrest in Tibet, and stressed her belief that there should be no boycott of the Olympics.
"We have not had good experiences with that, whether in Moscow or in Atlanta," she said.
In 1980, 60 countries boycotted the Moscow Olympics following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The Soviet Union and 16 of its allies retaliated four years later by boycotting the Atlanta Olympics.
In an article in this Sunday's edition of the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine released in advance, Merkel was quoted as saying: "My receiving the Dalai Lama and China's behaviour towards him are two entirely separate things.
"But both guide the way in which we behave in matters of respect or non-respect of human rights, and here Germany's attitude is explicit, including receiving the Dalai Lama,"
Merkel has been more vocal than her predecessor Gerhard Schroeder in criticising the human rights records of Russia and China.
Her spokesman in Berlin said earlier she would not attend the opening in Beijing in August, but stressed that this had never been planned. Germany will be represented by its sports minister.
"A lasting solution to the Tibet question can perhaps only be found through a peaceful and direct dialogue between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama," her spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm said earlier in Berlin.
It was "important that demonstrators, like the police forces, be urged to show moderation and the rights of each be taken into consideration."
Germany backed the Tibetans' rights to religious and cultural autonomy," while "supporting the policy of a single China."
Merkel faced intense criticism from her Christian Democrats' partners in the ruling coalition, the Social Democrats, for her decision to receive the Dail Lamae last September.
Both Schroeder, and Steinmeier, a Social Democrat, said the meeting was a mistake and may have damaged Germany's interests.
Merkel remained unapologetic. "Human rights policy and representing our economic interests all over the world are for us two sides of the same coin," she said in January.
- AFP /ls
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