Dalai Lama: Why is Roland Koch in concern

He enchants with his naturalness, and he inspires with his unmistakable aura: On Sunday the Dalai Lama turns 90, he stands for peace and reconciliation like hardly anyone else – and yet a drama is paving: the followers of the 14th Dalai Lama worries about his rebirth and thus the continued existence of this pillar of her culture. Even in Hesse you worry. Its holiness has visited the state around fifty times in the past decades, a circle of friends around Prime Minister Roland Koch keeps him loyalty. And there you just ask yourself: Has the world forgot the Dalai Lama?

Brief review: The little man in the dark red-orange robe smiles, waves and shines. 18,000 people came to Wiesbaden to see him, hear him talking, celebrating his 70th birthday with him. He says: “Do not think that I would be something special”, he was just “a simple monk”, and “If you don’t think my advice is right, just don’t take care of it.” It is July 2005.

There are three reasons for the connection of the Dalai Lama to Hesse: the Hessian entrepreneur Friedhelm Brückner, a circle of friends called “Friends for a friend” – and Roland Koch. In 1987 Roland Koch and the Dalai Lama met for the first time, Koch was a little politician of the Junge Union at the time. It must have been an impressive encounter, because over the years the two met over and over again – often early at Frankfurt Airport when the Dalai Lama stopped stopping.

“He is not up-to-friendly, but a personality that is extremely facing people and takes up people,” recalls Roland Koch today. As Prime Minister, he invited the man, whose pure existence for China is explosive, again and again, in 2005 he honored him with the Hessian Peace Prize. The Dalai Lama gave speeches in the Hessian state parliament, visited the Hessenpark and the Seligenstadt monastery. He gave lectures in universities, received honorary doctors and blessed the Tibethaus in Frankfurt – only one of three worldwide that personally blessed its holiness.

And Roland Koch always urged cultural freedom for the Tibetans, despite all the pressure of the Chinese. In 1951 China had occupied the small mountain country, in 1959 the crew was upright – the man had to flee the man, who at the time was the religious and secular head: Tenzin Gyatso, son of a farmer family, 1940 at the age of five as 14th Dalai Lama. Every visit to the Dalai Lama in Germany was accompanied by protests by China, politics in Berlin often closed their doors for the uncomfortable guest – Roland Koch, on the other hand, demanded international attention to the fate of Tibet. A friendship with China should “not have the award that a peaceful culture is going down,” Koch warned about 2015 when visiting the Dalai Lama in Wiesbaden.

Now, shortly before the 90th birthday of the Dalai Lama, they are very concerned about the head of the Tibetan and the continued existence of the Dalai Lama institution.

“Has the world forgot the Dalai Lama?” Asks the title of a book that the former editor -in -chief of the Wiesbadener Kurier, Stefan Schröder, wrote for the Dalai Lama on behalf of the Freundeskreis. Schröder has collected countless anecdotes around the trips of the Dalai Lama in Hesse, he commemorates personal encounters, trips and prizes, the great magic of the little monk from Tibet – and the ongoing “cultural genocide” of the Tibetans.

Because the fate of the Tibetans has long been pushed into the background by other crises, “the risk that the Dalai Lama will be forgotten is great,” says Koch. It is “about the survival of an entire people,” says Kelsang Gyaltsen, long -time special envoy of the Dalai Lama in Europe. And now China also claims to use the next Dalai Lama, to use someone who would be a puppet of the Communist Party, loyal to China. For Tibetans, it is “completely incomprehensible that a communist party wants to determine the religious head of a group of faith, says Gyaltsen:” The vast majority of the Tibetans will never accept a Chinese Dalai Lama. “

Only: China does not fit, so what becomes his holiness and the Tibetans when the 14th Dalai Lama dies? On Wednesday, he expressed himself on the question: Yes, he was ready for rebirth that the institution of the Dalai Lama will continue – and only the non -profit organization Gaden Phodrang Trust in Dharamsala had the authority to search for and recognize the next Dalai Lama. You can confidently understand that as a declaration of war towards China.

Gyaltsen was not surprised: “As long as time and space exist, as long as the universe exists, I want to be born again and again to alleviate the suffering of the living beings,” said the daily prayer of the Dalai Lama. From this, the Dalai Lama creates his strength and hope – hope that his suppressed people of the Tibetans need so bitterly. “The mission must not end”, Koch also demands in his afterword to Schröder’s book, because he learned one thing from Tensin Gyatso: Resignation and task is not an option, “only the one who gives up in the circulation of the history of people loses.”

“I have never experienced someone who is more profound than him,” says Koch. The Dalai Lama has always had a great interest in other cultures, an enormous curiosity to “penetrate our lives, I experienced that very practical.” A piece of serenity and the ability to think in larger contexts, he took that from the Dalai Lama, said Koch – and a very special impression of his aura. “Whenever he appeared somewhere – you may believe it or not – the world became a piece of peaceful, calmer, fascinating.”