Estonian MPs to visit Dalai Lama on official visit

TALLINN – Members of the Estonian parliament on Monday embarked on a trip to Dharamshala, India, to visit the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan exile government.

The visit to Dharamshala to meet with the exile government, the Dalai Lama an the Tibetan refugee community is led by the Tibet support group of the Estonian parliament. The MPs to meet with the Tibetans include support group chairman Juku-Kalle Raid and group members Tarmo Tamm and Henn Polluaas.

"The Tibet support group in the Riigikogu is currently the largest ever and it currently includes as many as 16 MPs," Raid said. "This is also completely understandable, as the situation in occupied Tibet with native language, education, politics, human rights and freedoms is incredibly complicated and is becoming more and more gloomy every day. China and Russia's cooperation in suppressing other nations has taken off, Iran's activities are also added to this, and of course all this is noticed."

The Dalai Lama has visited Estonia on three occasions -- in 1991, 2001 and 2011.

"The program is busy, and quite likely we will get a closer idea of what China has done in occupied Tibet," Raid said. "We will meet the president and ministers of the government-in-exile and will also visit the Tibetan parliament."

Dalai Lama is a title given by the Tibetan people to the foremost spiritual leader of the Gelug or "Yellow Hat" school of Tibetan Buddhism, the newest and most dominant of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism. When the People's Republic of China occupied Tibet in the 1950s, the current 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, went into exile in India in 1959, where he established a Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamshala.

In recognition of his peaceful struggle for the freedom of Tibet, the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.